
Class J?;K4A._i_l 
Book. .S4L^ 



Copyright N°, 



19 oz 



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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



(fngUjJl) jHcn of ttttn^ 

EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY 



GEORGE ELIOT 



■j^^y^ 



GEORGE ELIOT 



BY 



LESLIE STEPHEN 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON; MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 

1902 

All rights I'eierved 



THE LIBRARY ©F 

GONGRESS, 
Two Cowee RecetvEe 

FEB. 5 ^902 

C©FVRK3HT ENTRY 

CLASS Ct' XXa No. 

COPY a 



COPYEIQHT, 1902, 

By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 

Set up and electrotyped January, 1902. 



Nothjoot) 5P«0S 

J. S. CuBhing & Co. - Berwick i Smith 
Norwood Muss. U.S.A. 



'n 



;^. CONTENTS 



^ CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

Early Life 1 



CHAPTER II 
Coventry .......... 21 

CHAPTER III 
"The Westminster Review" 39 

CHAPTER IV 
"Scenes of Clerical Life" 61 

CHAPTER V 
"Adam Bede " 64 

CHAPTER VI 
"The Mill on the Floss" 86 

CHAPTER VII 

"Silas Marner " . . .105 

V 



vi CONTENTS 



CHAPTER VIII 

PAGE 

Middle Life 112 



CHAPTER IX 
"Romola" 122 

CHAPTER X 
"Felix Holt" 143 

CHAPTER XI 
"The Spanish GrpgY " 168 

CHAPTER XII 

" MiDDLEMARCH " 172 

CHAPTER XIII 
" Daniel Deronda "....... 185 

CHAPTER XIV 
Conclusion ......... 192 



GEORGE ELIOT 



GEOEGE ELIOT 



CHAPTER I 



EARLY LIFE 



Mary Ann Evans, as her father recorded in his 
diary, was born at Arbury Farm, at five o'clock in 
the morning of 22nd 'November 1819.^ Her father, 
Robert Evans, was son of George Evans, a builder and 
carpenter in Derbyshire. The family had migrated 
thither from Northop in Flintshire. Robert Evans 
was brought up to his father's business, and improved 
his position by remarkable qualities. He possessed 
great vigour both of mind and body, and was one 
of the men to whom love of good work is a religion. 
Once, when two labourers were waiting for a third to 
enable them to carry a heavy ladder, he took the 
whole weight upon his own shoulders, and astonished 
them by carrying it to its destination without help. 
He had also the keen eye of a skilful workman, and 
was especially famous for a power of calculating with 
singular accuracy the quantity of timber in a standing 
tree. He acquired the highest character for integrity 
and thorough devotion to his employers' interests. 
His extensive knowledge in very varied practical 
1 She called herself Marian. 

B 1 



2 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

departments, as his daughter says, " made his services 
valued through several counties. He had large know- 
ledge of mines, of plantations, of various branches of 
valuation and measurement — of all that is essential to 
the management of large estates." He was regarded 
as a nnique land-agent, and was able by giving his 
own services to save the special fees usually paid by 
landowners for expert opinions. His education had 
been imperfect, and this led to some self-distrust and 
" snbmissiveness in his domestic relations." The last 
peculiarity is reflected in the character of Mr. Garth 
in Middlemarcli ; and Mr. Garth and Adam Bede are 
obviously in some degree representative of the same 
type — one, it is to be feared, which has not become 
commoner since his time. About 1799 Robert Evans 
was agent to Mr. Francis Newdigate of Kirk Hallam 
in Derbyshire, under whom he also held a farm. In 
1806, upon the death of Sir Roger Kewdigate, Francis 
Newdigate inherited a life interest in the Arbury 
estate in Warwickshire, and Evans accompanied him 
thither in his old capacity. Colonel Newdigate, son 
of Francis, was much impressed by the merits of his 
father's agent, and through the colonel's influence 
Evans became agent to various other great landowners 
in the district. As became his position, Robert Evans 
was a sturdy Tory. He shared the patriotic sentiment 
of the days of Nelson and Wellington, and held that 
a revolutionary fanatic was a mixture of fool and 
scoundrel. " I was accustomed," says his daughter, 
'Ho hear him utter the word ' Government' in a tone 
that charged it with awe and made it part of my 
effective religion in contrast with the word ' rebel,' 
which seemed to carry the stamp of evil in its syllables, 



I.] EARLY LIFE 3 

and, lit by the fact that Satan was the first rebel, 
made an argument dispensing with more detailed 
inquiry." " Government," for practical purposes, 
meant the great landowners, who had good reasons 
for returning his respect. One of them requires a 
moment's notice. 

Sir Eoger jSTewdigate,' the previous owner of Arbury, 
was a typical specimen of the more cultivated country 
gentleman of his day. In early life he had naade the 
" grand tour," and had brought back ancient marbles 
and architectural drawings. He afterwards accepted 
the active duties of his position. He represented the 
University of Oxford for tliirty years (1750-1780) as 
a high Tory. He was an owner of collieries and a 
promoter of canals. He built a school and a poor- 
house for the parish in which Arbury Park is situated 
— Chilvers-Coton, near Kuneaton. He rebuilt Arbury 
House, which stood on the site of an ancient priory, 
in the " Gothic style " and adorned it with works of 
art and family portraits by Romney and Reynolds. 
His name at least is familiar to all Oxford men by 
the prize poem which he founded just before his 
death. The conditions prescribed by him for the 
competition show as much sense as can be expected 
from the founder of a prize poem. There were to be 
no compliments to himself, and the length of the poems 
was to be limited to fifty lines. Horace and King 
David, as he remarked, had succeeded in confining 
their noblest compositions within that length, and the 
quality of the future prize poems would probably not 
be such as to make us desire more of them than of 

1 See Tlie C'heverels of Cheverel Manor, by Lady Newdigate- 
Newdegate, 1898. 



4 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

the psalms or odes. Sir Roger died thirteeen years 
before the birth of Evans's daughter; but certain 
family stories in which he was concerned were handed 
down to her, and, as we shall see, suggested one of her 
most finished pieces of work. Eobert Evans's first 
wife, Hari'iet Poynton, had been for " many years," 
as her epitaph says, "the friend and servant of the 
family of Arbury." She had married Evans in 1801, 
and died in 1809, leaving two children. In 1813 
Evans married a woman of rather superior position, 
Christiana Pearson, by whom he had three children 
— Christiana, Isaac, and Mary Ann — Christiana being 
about five, and Isaac about three years older than the 
youngest child. In March 1820, when Mary Ann was 
four months old, the Evanses moved to Griff, ''a 
charming red brick, ivy-covered hoiise on the Arbury 
estate." It was to be the child's home for the first 
twenty-one years of her life. 

The impressions made upon the girl during these 
years are sufficiently manifest in the first series of her 
novels. Were it necessary to describe the general char- 
acteristics of English country life, they would enable 
the " graphic " historian to give life and colour to the 
skeleton made from statistical and legal information. 
The Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Becle, Silas Marner, 
and Tlie Mill on the Floss, probably give the most 
vivid picture now extant of the manners and customs 
of the contemporary dwellers in the midland counties 
of England. There is a temptation to press the 
likeness further. It is a favourite amusement of 
readers to identify characters in novels with histori- 
cal individuals. They sometimes seem to think 
that the question whether (for example) Caleb Garth 



I.] EARLY LIFE 5 

" was " Robert Evans can be answered by a simple 
Yes or No, like the question whether Junius was 
Philip Francis. In reality, of course, it is generally 
impossible to say precisely how far the portrait may 
have been studied from a single model, or modified 
intentionally, or by blending with more or less con- 
scious reminiscences of other originals. George Eliot 
(as it will be convenient to call her hereafter from 
her name in letters), like all good novelists, generally 
avoided direct delineation of individuals ; while, on 
the other hand, it is probable enough that she was 
sometimes following the facts more closely than she 
was herself aware. It is enough to say here that her 
mother had a " considerable dash of the Mrs. Poyser 
vein in her " ; that her mother's family more or less 
stood for the Dodsons in the Mill on the Floss; that 
her relations to her brother resembled those of IMaggie 
to Tom Tulliver in the same novel ; and that when 
describing Celia and Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch 
she was more or less recalling her relations to her 
elder sister Christiana. There is one person, however, 
whom a novelist can hardly helj) revealing directly or 
indirectly ; and in the case of George Eliot the revela- 
tion is unequivocal. There is no doubt, as we shall 
see, that the Mill on the Floss is substantially auto- 
biographical, not, of course, a statement of facts, but 
as a vivid embodiment of the early impressions and 
the first stages of spiritual development. The scanty 
framework of fact inay be partly filled up from this 
source. 

It is proper, however, at the present day to begin 
from the physical '' environment " of the organism 
whose history we are to study. The Warwickshire 



6 GEORGE ELIOT [chai-. 

landscape is not precisely stimulating : and if the 
county can boast of tlie greatest name in English 
literature, it must be remembered that Shakespeare 
had the good fortune to migrate to the centre of 
intellectual activity at an early period. Though the 
central watershed of England passes through the 
country, it has no mountain ridges, and the streams 
crawl off through modest undulations to more pictu- 
resque districts. In her twenty-first year George 
Eliot speaks of a little excursion in which she has (for 
the first time apparently) " gazed on some — albeit the 
smallest — of the ' everlasting hills,' " and has admired 
"those noblest children of the earth — fine healthy 
trees." She has seen, too, a fine parish church and 
Lichfield Cathedral. Through her childhood she had 
to put up with canals instead of rivers ; and saw no 
wilder open spaces than the decorous lawns of Arbury 
Park. Far aAvay in the north, the Bronte children — 
of whom Charlotte, the eldest, was her senior by three 
years — were spending their strange childhood in 
Haworth, learning to worship Nature on the Yorkshire 
moors, and to idealise the sturdy, crabbed. North- 
countrymen into Rochesters and Heathcliffs. We may 
speculate if we please upon the effects Avhich might 
have followed if the habitats of the two families coiild 
have been exchanged. If we may trust their por- 
trayers, the fat midland pastures were hardly more 
different from the Yorkshire moors than the stolid 
farmers of Warwickshire from the rough population 
of the West Riding. 

"Our midland plains," said George Eliot, "have 
never lost their familiar expression and conservative 
spirit for me ; yet at every other mile, since I first 



I.] EARLY LIFE 7 

looked on them, some sign of world-wide change, some 
new direction of human labour, has wrought itself 
into what one may call the speech of the landscape." 
The scenery, a monotonous succession of little ups 
and downs, is of the kind which owes its interest 
to its subordination to human society. In George 
Eliot's writings, there are proofs enough of sensibility 
to natural beauty, but the scenery is a background to 
the actors ; and there is no indication of such a passion 
for her native district as Scott felt for his " honest grey 
hills." The " midland plains " were " conservative," 
because they spoke of ancient order and peace ; and 
the opening pages of Felix Holt describe the scenery and 
explain its significance. The traveller of those days, 
seated by tlie side of one of Mr. Weller's colleagues, 
whirling at the amazing speed of ten miles an hour 
across the plain whence the waters flow to the Avon 
and the Trent, had yet time to read many indications 
of English life in the characteristic landscape. He 
saw broad meadows with their long lines of willow^s 
marking the water-courses ; and cornfields divided by 
the straggling hedgerows, economically wasteful but 
beautiful with their bushes of hawthorn and dog-roses. 
He came upon remote hamlets, abodes of dirt and 
ignorance, each knowing of the world which lay beyond 
its '' own patch of earth and sky " only by intercourse 
with " big, bold, gin-breathing tramps." But at times 
also he passed through " trim cheerful villages," where 
the cottage gardens bloomed with wall-flowers and 
geraniums, and the blacksmith and the wheelwright 
were plying their cheerful trades. Solid farmers were 
jogging past from their comfortable homesteads, where 
quaint yew-tree arbours were backed by the great 



8 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

cornstacks. At intervals appeared the squires' state- 
lier mansions, embowered in the patrician trees of his 
park, and hard by the grey old churches with sleep- 
compelling pews were the parsonages where the 
squire's younger son was quartered, not yet prescient 
of the " movement," and free at least from " too 
much zeal." In such districts the eighteenth century 
calm lingered pleasantly, and the ideal types repre- 
sented by Sir Roger de Coveiiey and the Vicar of 
Wakefield, or by Sqiiire Western and Trulliber, might 
still be recognised. A Sir Roger ISTewdigate had ac- 
quired a taste, and here and there clerical calm was 
being ruffled by Evangelical or Methodist agitation. 
Bi\t the district was one of ''protuberant optimists, sure 
that Old England was the best of all possible countries, 
and that if there were any facts which had not fallen 
under their own observation 'they were facts not worth 
observing." The traveller, it is true, might soon come 
up.on a very different scene. The coach would emerge 
from the deep-rutted lanes into a village '^ dingy with 
coal-dust, noisy with the shaking of looms," or " would 
rattle over the pavement of a manufacturing town, 
the scene of riots and trade-union meetings." The 
land around him was blackened with coal-pits, and 
the population was by no means convinced that all 
change must be for the worse ; and yet these busy 
scenes seemed ''to make but crowded nests in the 
midst of the large-spaced, slow-moving life of home- 
stead and far-away cottages and oak-sheltered parks." 
In the quiet agricultural region, squire and parson, 
and the whole social machinery of which they repre- 
sented the mainspring, could still be accepted as part 
of the unalterable system of things. The villager 



I.] EAKLY LIFE 9 

was too ignorant even to conceive the possibility of 
change ; and if the farmer grumbled over the ruinous 
results of peace, he retained his traditional reverence 
for the old families, and looked with horror upon 
proposals for the intrusion of railways or manufac- 
turing demands for free trade. If the upper social 
stratum was aware that in the great towns there were 
Radicals demanding the abolition of the House of 
Lords and the confiscation of Church property, it 
inferred that the demon of revolution had not been 
completely exorcised, but could still hope that, with 
the help of the great Duke, the evil spirit might be 
confined to his proper region, and the British Consti- 
tution be upheld as the pride and envy of the world. 

In due time George Eliot was to portray various 
phases of the society around her, including the Radical 
as well as the fine old Tory. In her childhood, of 
course, she took the colouring of her surroundings. To 
the infant the arrangements of its nursery are as unal- 
terable as the laws of the solar system and the exist- 
ence of any other order inconceivable. Her world was 
the fireside of Griff ; and if she had glimpses of the 
outside, the views of Mr. Robert Evans represented 
ultimate truth, or were taken as indisputable assertions 
of matter of fact. He was fond of his little girl, and 
took her for occasional outings in his gig, or on expe- 
ditions to neighbouring country towns. The family 
circle was small. Soon after her birth, her mother's 
health became weak ; the elder girl, Christiana, was 
sent to school ; and Mary Ann with her brother spent 
part of every day at a dame-school close to their own 
gat^s. She did not show any remarkable precocity, 
though she was both a thoughtful and a very affec- 



10 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

tionate and sensitive child. Her brother became 
naturally the first object of her devotion, and devotion 
to some one was throughout her life a marked need of 
her nature. AVhile still under five years old, she went 
through the experiences more or less idealised in the 
Mill on the Floss, and more historically commemorated 
in the series of sonnets called Brother and /Sister. She 
tells in the poems how she rambled with him through 
the meadows; across the rivulet hidden by tangled 
forget-me-nots ; through the rookery and by the 
"brown canal," where the barges seemed to bring 
intimations of an unknown world beyond. In the 
copse, there were traces of the " mystic gypsies," 
where Mr. Petulengro perhaps had encamped, though 
when she actually met him — if the narrative in the 
3fill on the Floss be authentic history — he was a less 
romantic being than we should judge from his behav- 
iour in Lacengro. Then, too, she had the wonderful 
adventure of catching a perch by mistake, which sug- 
gests the inevitable moral, namely, that "luck was 
with glory wed." The early hero-worship of the little 
girl running like a puppy after the slightly bigger 
brother is simply and touchingly described. " School 
parted us," she says ; and she never found that child- 
ish world again. 

' But were another childish world my share, 
I would be born a little sister there.' 

Her brother was sent to school when she was five 
years old; and as her mother was still in bad health, 
she was sent to join her sister at a school kept by a 
Miss Lathom at Attleboro, a village only a mile or two 
distant from Griff. She continued there for three or 
four years, spending her Sundays at home. Her chief 



I.] EARLY LIFE 11 

memory of this part of her life was the difficulty of 
getting a seat near the fireplace in cold weather. Her 
health was low, it seems, and she suffered from the 
nightly terrors which haunt delicate children, and which 
she has ascribed to Gwendolen Harleth. " All her 
soul," she said, " became a quivering fear." The other 
pupils, however, made a pet of their small companion, 
and she was not unhappy. She began to read such 
books as then came in the way of children. In one of 
them, called The Linnet's Life, she afterwards wrote a 
few words, stating that it was the first present from 
her father which she could remember, and recording 
her early delight in its pages. She remembered, too, 
her absorption in ^sop's Fables, and laughed heartily 
over the pleasure she had taken in the humour of 
"Mercury and the Statue Seller." A stray volume of 
Joe Miller supplied her with anecdotes wherewith to 
astonish her family. In those days children were less 
distracted by miscellaneous scraps of print, and could 
pore over the same thumbed and dogs-eared favourites. 
In her eighth or ninth year she was sent to a larger 
school, kept by a Miss AYallington at Nuneaton. Here 
there were some thirty boarders, and she became espe- 
cially intimate with Miss Lewis, the principal governess. 
Her passion for reading developed rapidly. A stray 
Waverley came in her way ; and when that was returned 
to its owner before she had finished it, she began 
writing out the story for herself, till her elders got it 
back for her. She was fascinated by an extract from 
Lamb's Captain Jackson even in an almanac; and among 
her favourite books were Defoe's History of the Devil, 
Pilgrim's Progress, and Rasselas. By this time it was 
beginning to be understood that there was something 



12 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

remarkable about the child. She excited the admira- 
tion of the home circle by acting charades with her 
brother during the holidays ; and if not a decided 
" prodigy," was clearly capable of absorbing such in- 
tellectual influences as could be found in Warwickshire. 
In her thirteenth year she was transferred to a school 
at Coventry. It was kept by two ladies named 
Franklin, daughters of a Baptist minister, who had for 
many years preached in a chapel at Coventry. He 
lived in a house " almost exactly resembling that of 
Kufus Lyon in Felix HoUy Lyon's character and some 
of his little personal peculiarities were also suggested 
by this original. George Eliot was always grateful to 
the daughters for the excellence of their teaching. 
She was at once recognised as the most promising of 
their pupils. Her themes were kept for the private 
edification of her teachers, instead of being read in the 
class like those of her comrades. She had good 
masters in French and German and music. She was 
sometimes called upon to display her musical skill 
before visitors, as the best performer in the school ; 
and obeyed with ready good humour, though suffer- 
ing agonies of shyness. The love of music generally 
shows itself at an early age, but she had apparently 
some difficulty in yielding to the passion. Three 
years after leaving school, she attended an oratorio at 
Coventry, and says in a letter that she thinks it will 
be her last. She declares that she has '' no soul for 
music," and is a ''tasteless person." She therefore is 
not qualified to discuss the question of the " propriety 
or lawfulness of such exhibitions of talent." For her- 
self, she would not regret if music were strictly con- 
fined to purposes of worship; and cannot think that "a 



I.] EARLY LIFE 13 

pleasure that wishes the devotion of all the time and 
powers of an immortal being to the acquirement of an 
expertness in so useless . . . an accomplishment can be 
quite pure and elevating in its tendency." The reli- 
gious theory is, as we shall see, characteristic ; but it 
is singular that a woman who was to find one of her 
greatest delights in music, and who was already skilled 
in the art, should think herself devoid of the capacity. 
Two years later, indeed, she was moved to " hysterical 
sobbing " by another oratorio. She was always diffi- 
dent and easily discouraged ; and these reflections may 
mean merely an attack of low spirits. Perhaps the 
want of " soul " meant only the absence of a specific 
aptitude for the musician's calling; or, possibly, the 
singing at Coventry was out of tune.^ 

George Eliot left school finally at the end of 1835. 
Her mother was failing in health, and died in the 
summer of 1836, after a long illness, during which she 
was nursed by her daughters. In the following spring 
the elder daughter, Christiana, married Mr. Edward 
Clarke, a surgeon in Warwickshire, and Mary Ann 
undertook the charge of her father's household at Griff. 
She set her mind to the work, and became, it is said, an 
" exemplary housewife." She also exerted herself in 
promoting various charitable works, and continued to 
study Italian, German, and music. Her brother was 
now beginning to take a share in their father's busi- 

1 Mr. W. A. White of New York has kindly shown nie a 
letter to another friend in which George Eliot speaks of the 
same oratorio. It might be urged, she admits, that such 
exhibitions show "the beautiful powers of the human voice 
■when carried to the highest point of improveability." But such 
reasoning would compel us to admit " opera-dancing, horse- 
racing, and even intemperance." 



14 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

neSB-4 and found his chief relaxation from hard work in 
hunting — an amusement which was not in his sister's 
line. He had also become a High Churchman, whereas 
she was strongly Evangelical. Although, therefore, 
the family was bound by ties of warm affection, she 
found little sympathy in her favourite occupations. She 
lived in intellectual solitude, conscious of abilities for 
which she could find no definite outlet, and with no 
one in her immediate circle capable of guiding or even 
appreciating her pursuits. When long afterwards an 
autobiography was suggested to her, she replied : " The 
only thing I should much care to dwell on [in regard 
to this period] would be the absolute despair T suffered 
from of ever being able to do anything. No one 
could ever have felt greater despair, and a knowledge 
of this might be a help to some other struggler." On 
the other hand, she added with a smile, " it might only 
lead to an increase of bad writing." 

The account of George Eliot's school days may per- 
haps suggest that the state of female education in 
Warwickshire was not altogether so bad as energetic 
modern reformers are apt to assume. There is, it is 
true, something of a quaint old-fashioned colouring 
about the system. Her comrades at Miss Franklin's 
thought that she was competent " to get up something 
in the way of a clothing club " ; and beyond that 
limited prospect, they may possibly have dared to hope 
that she might develop into a Mrs. Chapone or Miss 
Carter — capable of writing letters "upon the im- 
provement of the human mind," or possibly, in time, of 
translating Epictetus. She was not, indeed, competent 
to take a first-class in a University examination, or to 
enter any career for which such honours qualified the 



I.] EARLY LIFE 15 

nobler sex; and yet, if we really believed what we are 
so often told, that the test of a good education is not 
the stock of knowledge acquired, but the stimulus 
given to mental activity, the schooling seems to have 
been successful enough. Her intellectual curiosity 
was roused, though not yet fixed upon any definite 
object. From the correspondence which she kept up 
with her early governess. Miss Lewis, it seems that 
she read a great deal of miscellaneous literature during 
sixteen years at Griff. My mind, she says in 1839, 
presents " an assemblage of disjointed specimens of 
history, ancient and modern ; scraps of poetry picked 
up from Shakespeare, Cowper, Wordsworth, and 
Milton ; newspaper topics ; morsels of Addison and 
Bacon, Latin verbs, geometry, entomology, and chem- 
istry ; Reviews and metaphysics — all arrested and 
petrified and smothered by the fast-thickening every- 
day accession of actual events, relative anxieties, and 
household cares and vexations. How deplorably and 
unaccountably evanescent are our frames of mind, as 
various as forms and hues of the summer clouds ! " 
For a girl of nineteen, both the style and the variety 
of intellectual interests indicated are remarkable. A 
genius, it may be suggested, can thrive anywhere; 
and so long as it is not absolutely fettered, can derive 
nourishment from any set of materials that may come 
in its way. There is, however, a special characteristic 
of George Eliot which already appears. A strong 
imaginative impulse is generally developed early ; it 
is an overmastering faculty which forces its possessor 
into activity often before knowledge or serious thought 
has accumulated ; draws romances, epic poems, and 
dramas from children in their teens; and suggests 



16 GEOKGE ELIOT [chap. 

that not only the material surroundings, but even the 
storage of intellectual accomplishments is but an acci- 
dental stimulus to the innate creative power. Char- 
lotte and Emily Bronte, for example, informed the 
world around them with so much passion and imagina- 
tion, that we fancy that any other circumstances would 
have served for an incentive to powers only waiting to 
be set at liberty. George Eliot, diffident in character, 
and reflective as much as imaginative in intellect, 
developed slowly, and was for many years ignorant 
of her own truest powers. She had a full share of the 
feminine docility, which is so charming to teachers — 
especially of the other sex. Women really enjoy 
lectures, strange as the taste appears to the male at 
all ages. Even a clever boy generally regards his 
schoolmaster as a natural enemy, and begins as a rebel. 
The girl takes the master at his own valuation, or 
something more, and has an innocent belief that 
lessons give really desirable information. George 
Eliot was clearly of this way of thinking; and though 
she must have been aware of possessing unusual 
ability, she was anxious to bow submissively to 
the best instructors. At Griff or in her circle at 
Coventry no very brilliant intellectual light was 
shining, nor did even a very clear understanding 
prevail as to the real lights of contemporary thought. 
People had not taken to reading the last German 
authorities ; and had vague enough impressions as to 
the course of European speculation. Miss Lewis and 
the Miss Franklins were ardent Evangelicals ; and the 
Evangelical school of the day, though not given to 
philosophy, representing at least the most socially 
active party in the Church, was so far attractive to her 



I.] EARLY LIFE 17 

intellectually. It meant at any rate a protest against 
stagnation. Then, moreover, through life she had 
very deep religious sentiments, and for the present 
associated them with the Evangelical dogma. She 
was greatly impressed by the wife of her father's 
younger brother, Mrs. Samuel Evans, a Methodist 
preacher, of whom I shall presently have to speak 
again. " I shall not only suffer, but be delighted to 
receive the word of exhortation," she writes to her 
aunt in 1839, ''and I beg you not to withhold it." 
The most curious of her letters in these years is one 
to Miss Lewis, discussing with a quaint gravity the 
ethics of reading fiction. She is good enough to admit 
that certain standard works must be read — Scott, for 
example, and Don Quixote — otherwise one would 
not understand common allusions. Shakespeare, too, 
is inevitable, though one must be as nice as the bee 
" to suck nothing but honey from his pages." A 
teacher, too, may consider it desirable to read fiction 
by way of tasting for her pupils. But it is dangerous 
to make trial on oneself of a cup because it is suspected 
of being poisonous. She herself has suffered from the 
poison. Her early reading of novels, lent by kind 
friends, led her to castle-building, which she appar- 
ently thinks a pernicious habit. No one, of course, 
'' ever dreamed of recommending " novels to children ; 
but men and women are but children of a larger 
growth. They cannot be sure at any age of resisting 
the evil influences. Nothing can be learned from 
novels which cannot be better learned from history; 
and when she is driven to tears by the impossibility 
of learning more than a fraction of realities, can 
she " have any time to spend on things that never 



18 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

existed " ? It is plain that in tliose days aestlietic 
prophets had not begun to expound the true relations 
of art and morality ; and many young ladies of nine- 
teen at the present day would consider themselves 
competent to open the eyes of this didactic young 
person. Her views changed in good time; but the 
moral earnestness Avhich prompted these rather crude 
remarks was a permanent characteristic. Meanwhile, 
if her scruples hindered her from acquiring a wide 
knowledge upon the novels of the day, she was 
spending her time to better purpose in the miscel- 
laneous reading already noticed. Wordsworth, it may 
be observed, was an early favourite to whom she 
remained faithful through life, and appealed to her 
as, shortly before, he had appealed, though still more 
strongly, to J. S. Mill. She was much impressed, too, 
by Young's Night Tlioughts, an edifying work which 
in later years she criticised with the severity of a 
revolted disciple. Her studies naturally took a theo- 
logical direction. She begins with Hannah More and 
Wilberforce, and is presently interested by the con- 
troversies aroused by the Oxford movement. She can- 
not make np her mind as to the solution. She reads 
an essay on '' Schism " by Professor Hoppus of the 
London University, and the Evangelical Milner's Church 
History. She compares their views with those of The 
Portrait of an English Churchman, by W. Gresley, an 
early champion of '' Tractarianism," and finds that the 
Tracts themselves show a "confused appreciation of 
the great doctrine of justification." They approach 
too nearly to the Church marked by the " prophetical 
epithets " of " the scarlet beast " and the " Mystery of 
Iniquity." The authors, it is true, are zealous, learned, 



I.] EARLY LIFE 19 

and devoted, but " Satan is too crafty to commit his 
cause into the hands of those who have nothing to 
recommend them to approbation." She is pleased, 
however, by the Lyra Apostolica and the '' sweet 
poetry " of the Christian Year. She is presently much 
impressed by the work upon Ancient Christianity and 
the Oxford Tracts, by Isaac Taylor, "one of the most 
eloquent, acute, and pious of writers." She has 
" gulped it in a most reptile-like fashion," but must 
"chew it thoroughly to facilitate its assimilation 
with her mental frame." She is attracted, too, by 
the " stirring eloquence " of The Great Teacher, written 
by John Harris, a popular writer of the time, with 
liberal tendencies, who was afterwards principal of 
an Independent College. These studies, it must be 
remembered, represent her state of mind before the 
completion of her twenty-first year. She was soon 
to come under new influences. Meanwhile she was 
already ambitious enough to propose to make a 
practical application of her reading, and planned a 
" chart " of ecclesiastical history, with columns show- 
ing the dates of the principal personages, events, 
schisms, and so forth, with perhaps one for the 
fulfilment of the prophecies. Happily a chart was 
published by some one else which extinguished hers, 
and she turned to other studies. A different result of 
her meditations was a poem, which, though not her first 
attempt at poetry, was the first published. It is a fare- 
well to the world, of which this is a specimen : — 

" Books that have been to me as chests of gold, 
Which, miserlike, I secretly have told, 
And for them love, health, friendship, peace have sold, 

Farewell ! 



20 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. i. 

Blest Volume ! whose clear truth-writ page once known 
Fades not before heaven's sunshine and hell's moan, 
To thee I say not, of earth's gifts alone. 

Farewell ! 

Then shall my new-born senses find new joy, 
New sounds, new sights, my ears and eyes employ. 
Nor fear that word that here brings sad alloy. 

Farewell!" 

The. editor of the Christian Observer, in which the 
lines appeared (January 1840), adds a note to the 
effect that in heaven we shall be able to do without 
the Bible. The verses, howevei*, if suspected of this 
trifling heresy, show religious feeling much more 
distinctly than poetical power, in which they resemble 
most sacred poetry. 



CHAPTER II 



COVENTRY 



When George Eliot was just twenty-one a change 
took place in her life which was to produce most 
important results. Her brother had married, and it 
was arranged that he should take over his father's 
business at Griff. Mr. Robert Evans, now sixty-six, 
with his daughter migrated to Coventry. They took 
a semi-detached house in the Foleshill Road, with a 
*' good bit of garden round it," and commanding a wide 
reach of country, though the view was disfigured by 
mills and chimneys in the foreground. The secluded 
agricultural district was exchanged for an energetic 
manufacturing town, and George Eliot was gaining 
a new set of experiences, to be turned to account in 
good time. Hitherto her life had been one of intel- 
lectual isolation, though she had been encouraged by 
the sympathy of Miss Lewis. She had aspirations as 
well as reflections, and complains to her Methodist 
aunt that her "besetting sin was ambition — a desire 
insatiable for the esteem of my fellow-creatures. This 
seems the centre whence all my actions proceed.'' But 
the powers of which she was conscious were choked 
in the confined atmosphere where men, as Johnson's 
friend complained, talked of "runts," that is (according 
to Boswell) young cows. Dr. Johnson, replied an 

21 



22 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

admirer, would learn to talk of runts. George Eliot 
certainly listened to the talk, and then or in memory 
could perceive its humorous aspect ; but talk confined to 
runts becomes tiresome in the long run ; and when her 
loftiest hope was to compile a historical chart, she must 
have felt a painful need for some better end for her 
energies. Some one who would share her interests and 
direct her aspirations was obviously desirable if she was 
to escape from the diffident " despair " into which she 
was tempted to sink. Coventry could hardly be de- 
scribed, I imagine, as a Warwickshire Athens, or even 
Edinburgh; but at Coventry, as it happened, there were 
some people of much wider outlook than could have been 
expected. Charles Bray (1811-1884) wasaribbon manu- 
facturer and a man of energy and philanthropic aims. 
He was a disciple of George Combe the phrenologist, 
whose Constitution of Man had a great influence at this 
time, though not much recognised by the authoritative 
expounders of philosophy. Bray himself in 1841 pub- 
lished The Plulosophy of Necessity, intended to apply 
Combe's scientific principles to the regeneration of 
society. Like George and Andrew Combe, he sym- 
pathised with Robert Owen the Socialist, and took a 
special interest in the attempt to found a community 
at Queenwood. Upon its failure he took a part in 
less ambitious schemes for the improvement of the 
working classes. In 1836 Bray married Caroline, 
sister of Charles and Sara Hennell. The Hennells had 
been brought up as Unitarians ; and after his sister's 
marriage to Bray, a thoroughgoing sceptic, Charles 
IJennell undertook to examine the evidences of Chris- 
tianity with a view to meeting his brother-in-law's 
objections. The result of the examination was that he 



II.] COVENTRY 23 

became a sceptic himself, and iu 1838 published an 
Enquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity in defence 
of his conclusions. The book is intended to show that 
Christianity is explicable by purely natural causes. 
A criticism of the New Testament narrative leads to 
the conclusion that Jesus was a man of high moral 
genius, who belonged originally to the sect of the 
Essenes, and developed their teaching under the 
influence of the time. Strauss, whose Life of Christ 
had appeared in 1835, procured a translation of 
Hennell's book into German ; and in a preface says 
that Hennell, although ignorant of recent German 
criticism, was " on the very track " which the Germans 
had entered. He had, too, the practical insight of an 
English man of business, and solved " at one spring " 
problems over which the German '-flutters with 
many learned formulae." Hennell treated the subject 
in the " earnest and dignified tone of the truthseeker " ; 
and, unlike rancorous assailants of Christianity, derived 
religion, not from priestcraft, but from the essential 
needs of human nature. George Eliot's admiration 
for the book is shown by an analysis ^ which she wrote 
on the occasion of its republication in 1852. She 
bought a copy soon after going to Coventry, and had 
read it before she met the Brays. Kingsley mentions 
it as one of the books which Alton Locke studied as 
a representative of the "intelligent artisans of the 
period." Hennell's sister Sara was interested in the 
same questions, and expounded her doctrines at length 
in Present Religion as a Faith owning Felloivship with 
Thought. It appeared in three volumes in 1865, 1873, 
and 1887, and is one of the many attempts to present 
1 Giveu iu Life, j. 76-83. 



24 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

a philosophical theism in consistence with scientific 
thought by the help of a doctrine of evolution. I am 
not qualified to speak of its philosophical merits on 
the strength of a very superficial inspection, but it is 
plain that Miss Hennell had read and reflected suffi- 
ciently to be accepted by George Eliot as a valuable 
ally in the sphere of philosophical speculation. Her 
decided theism led her to criticise Comte with a 
hostility which separated her opinions from those of 
her friend. They continued, however, to correspond 
with mutual respect and affection. 

The Evanses' house in Coventry was next door to 
that occupied by Mrs. Pears, a sister of Mr. Bray. 
An acquaintance with her neighbour Mrs. Pears soon 
ripened into friendship, and led in November 1841 to 
an introduction to the Brays. A very warm friendship 
sprang up. Cara and Sara (Mrs. Bray and Miss 
Hennell) became as sisters to George Eliot, and Mr. 
Bray her most intimate male friend. The alliance 
lasted through life, and produced an important corre- 
spondence. The effect upon George Eliot's mental 
development was immediate and remarkable. The 
little circle at Coventry introduced her to a new 
world of thought. It became clear that there were 
regions of speculation into which her respected gov- 
erness Miss Lewis and her beloved aunt Mrs. Samuel 
Evans had never entered. A letter to Miss Lewis of 
loth November 1841 indicates the change which had 
come over her, and apparently refers to a recent study 
of Bray's Enquiry. " My whole soul," she says, " has 
been engrossed in the most interesting of all inquiries 
for the last few days, and to what result my thoughts 
will lead I know not — possibly to one that will startle 



11.] COVENTRY 25 

you; but my only desire is to know the truth, my 
only fear to cling to error." She hopes that their 
"love will not discompose under the influence of 
separation." " What a pity," she says to the same 
correspondent a few days later, "that while mathe- 
matics are indubitable, immutable, and no one doubts 
the properties of a triangle or a circle, doctrines infi- 
nitely important to man are biiried in a charnel heap 
of bones, over which nothing is heard but the barks 
and growls of contention." The change of belief thus 
indicated appears to have been rapid, though there 
are indications of previous doubts as to her childish 
creed. By January 1842 it had led to a refusal to go 
to church, and a consequent family difficulty. It is 
not surprising that George Eliot should have followed 
a path which was being taken by many contemporaries ; 
but something must be said of her special position, 
which was in many ways characteristic. The chief 
light upon her conversion — if I may use the phrase — 
comes from another source. George Eliot had been 
introduced to a family named Sibree by her old school- 
mistress. Miss Franklin, and came to entertain a high 
regard for several of its members. The Sibrees were 
of the Evangelical persuasion. A son, Mr. John Sibree, 
went to a German university in 1842, and afterwards 
translated Hegel's Pldloi<ophy of History, a fact appar- 
ently implying that the Brays were not the only inhab- 
itants of Coventry with some taste for philosophical 
speculation. George Eliot took a fancy to a daughter. 
Miss Mary Sibree, then a young girl, gave her German 
lessons, and ''talked freely on all subjects," without 
attempting "directly to unsettle her Evangelical be- 
liefs." Miss Sibree (afterwards Mrs. John Cash) pre- 



26 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

served some interesting records of the intercourse, 
which show that the change of opinions, if rapid, was 
not unprepared. Till she left Griff, George Eliot had 
still used the religious language of her own circle. 
But the studies which have already been mentioned 
had raised doubts. Isaac Taylor's book, which she pro- 
posed to " assimilate," was in substance an attempt to 
show that the early Church, to which the Tractarians 
referred as the embodiment of pure Christianity, was 
in fact already corrupt. The obvious difficulty of such 
an argument is to stop at the right point. If the early 
fathers, to whom Pusey and his friends appealed, were 
already unworthy of confidence, what is to be said of 
their predecessors ? That was just the line taken by 
Hennell. He rejects the supernatural explanation in 
the case of the first teachers as well as in the case 
of their followers. George Eliot's "chart" already 
implied an interest in ecclesiastical history which 
might lead to a criticism of the origins as well as 
of the later development of the creed. It might be 
noticed, too, that she was making excursions into 
scientific reading — Mrs. Somerville's Connexion of the 
Physical Sciences, for example — and would, of course, 
be interested in the bearing of geology upon the book 
of Genesis. But the purely intellectual aspect of the 
question was in a great degree subordinate to other 
considerations. She told Mrs. Sibree that she had 
been shocked by the union of low morality with strong 
religious feeling among the poor, chiefly Methodists, 
whom she had been in the habit of visiting. There 
were, it seems, specimens there of the " Holy Willie " 
type. They held to the Calvinism expressed in his 
famous prayer — 



II.] COVENTRY 27 

' Thou, wha in the heavens dost dwell, 
Wha, as it pleases best ThyseP, 
Sends ahi to heaven and ten to hell, 

A' for Thy glory, 
And no' for onie guid or ill 

They 've done afore Thee ! ' 

and apparently were capable of following his very 
defective practice. " I do not feel," said a woman con- 
victed of lying, '' that I have grieved the Spirit much." 
" Calvinism," George Eliot is reported to have said at 
the time, "is Christianity, and that granted, it is a 
religion based on pure selfishness." I need not ask 
whether Christianity can be identified with Calvinism, 
or whether antinomianism or pure egoism be in reality 
a logical deduction from Calvinism. Anyhow, it is 
clear that she might be led to one conclusion. Since 
Mrs. Samuel Evans and the lying old woman held 
the same dogmatic creed, it followed that Mrs. Evans' 
lovely moral nature could not be the product of the 
dogmas. Other reflections tended to the same result. 
Robert Hall, she said, had been made unhappy for a 
week by reading Miss Edgeworth's Tales. In them the 
characters led good, useful, and pleasant lives without 
reference to the cares and fears of religion. They 
were, in fact, model Utilitarians. When George Eliot 
was asked in later life what influence had unsettled her 
orthodoxy, she replied, " Walter Scott's " ! Scott has 
generally been credited with a different influence. 
His romantic tendency was one of the causes, according 
to Newman, the highest authority on the point, which 
led to the reaction towards the mediaeval Church. 
George Eliot sympathised with another, and perhaps 
a really deeper, characteristic of his writings. Scott 
was a man of sympathies wide enough to do justice to 



28 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

many different types. He hated the fanaticism of the 
Covenanters, and speaks of them in his letters as 
scarcely human except in outward form. Yet he was 
too good 'an artist to yield to his antipathies ; and in 
Old Mortality and the Heart of Midlotliian has drawn 
the most striking pictures of the iron heroism and 
stern morality of the sect, George Eliot would have 
taken a similar view of Balfour of Burley and Davie 
Deans. But, in a wider sense, it is obvious that while 
Scott sincerely respects religious feelings and sympa- 
thises with belief, he shows as little sectarian zeal as 
Shakespeare. The division between good and bad 
does not correspond in his pages with the division 
between any one church and its antagonists. The 
qualities which he really admires — manliness, patriot- 
ism, unflinching loyalty, and purity of life — are to' 
be found equally among Protestants and Catholics, 
Roundheads and Cavaliers. The wide sympathy 
which sees good and bad on all sides makes it difficult 
to accept any version of the doctrine which supposes 
salvation to be associated with the acceptance of a 
dogma. That clearly was George Eliot's frame of 
mind. She would not directly attack her young 
friend's Evangelicism, but she smiled in the kindest 
way at the doctrine that there could be no true moral- 
ity without it. " The great lesson of life," she said, " is 
tolerance," and a width of sympathy was perhaps her 
most characteristic quality. Her revolt from orthodox 
views was therefore unaccompanied by the bitterness 
which often accompanies the emancipation from the 
strictness of a sectarian tyranny. She continued to 
revere her aunt ; only she had made up her mind that 
the beauty of character was in no sense the product of 



11.] COVENTRY 29 

the creed. Nor, on the other hand, had it jDrodnced 
the immorality of coarse hypocrites. Taken literally 
and seriously, the dogmas might tend to suppress and 
trammel the emotional nature ; but, in point of fact, 
beautiful souls manage to turn even their creeds to 
account by an unconscious logical artifice which leaves 
the dark side out of sight and dwells upon the higher 
and gentler aspirations embodied. 

Her first recognition of a change of creed engen- 
dered a passing aggressiveness. A Baptist minister 
was induced by Miss Franklin to attempt a recovery 
of the lost sheep. "That young lady," he said, 
"must have had the devil at her elbow to suggest 
doubts, for there was not a book that I recom- 
mended to her in support of Christian evidences that 
she had not read." The phrase is a little ambiguous, 
and may be taken to attribute the books on the 
evidences to the devil's suggestion. " I have attended 
the University sermon for forty years," said a well- 
known Squire Bedell, "and I thank God that I am 
still a Christian." An unconvincing refutation is apt 
to be irritating, and for a time George Eliot was 
stimulated to the combative mood. Her father was 
a "churchman of the old school." His religious 
notions partook of those ascribed in the Mill on 
the Floss to Mr. Tulliver and the Dodsons. They, 
we are told, had the strongest respect for what- 
ever was customary, including an acceptance of 
the rites of the Established Church ; though their 
"theory of life" had "the very slightest tincture of 
theology." Mr. Evans was so much annoyed by 
his daughter's abandonment of churchgoing, that he 
resolved to give up the house at Coventry and to 



30 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

take up his abode with his married daughter. George 
Eliot proposed to take lodgings at Leamington and 
try to support herself by teaching. Friends on both 
sides, however, effected a reconciliation. She agreed 
to go to church again, and her father was glad to 
receive her again upon those terms, and apparently 
asked no questions about her opinions, and made no 
difficulty as to the employment of her talents which 
. they were soon to suggest. Some months later she 
wrote to Sara Hennell, giving the view to which she 
had been brought by further reflection. " When the 
soul," she says, "is just liberated from the wretched 
giant's bed of dogmas on which it has been racked 
and stretched ever since it began to think, there is a 
feeling of exultation and strong hope. In that state 
of mind we wish to proselytise." We soon find that 
we can ourselves " ill afford to part even with the 
crutch of superstition," and that the errors which we 
took to be a " mere incrustation " have grown into the 
living body, " and cannot be wrenched away without 
destroying vitality." Intellectual agreement seems to 
be unattainable, and " we turn to the tnith of feeling as 
the only universal bond of union." It is quackery to 
say to every one, " Swallow my opinions and you shall 
be whole." When the proselytising impulse is aban- 
doned, we ask, " Are we to remain aloof from our fellow- 
creatures on occasions when we may fully sympathise 
with the feelings exercised, although our own have 
been melted into another mood ? Ought we not on 
ever}'- opportunity to seek to have our feelings in 
harmony, though not in union, with those who are 
often richer in the fruits of faith, though not in reason, 
than ourselves ? " The position is characteristic of her 



II.] COVENTRY 31 

attitude through life. She shrank with deep repug- 
nance from attacking even what she regarded as 
superstitions which, in the minds of believers, were 
interwoven with the highest aspirations. She still 
insists upon the necessity of free discussion and open 
avowals of honest belief ; but her own temperament 
demanded the tenderest treatment of other creeds. 
To her exquisitely sensitive nature, the pain of inflict- 
ing pain on others would not have been compensated 
by any share of the true controversialist's joy in battle. 
In later years she did not hold that she had deserved 
blame for the domestic difficulty, but she regretted a 
collision which might have been avoided by judicious 
management. 

The reconciliation was made in the spring of 1842, 
and for the next seven years George Eliot lived at 
Coventry with her father. The friendship with the 
Brays provided her with congenial society and intel- 
lectual sympathy. She made summer expeditions 
with them to Wales, the Lakes (where she made 
acquaintance with Miss Martineau), and Scotland. She 
met Robert Owen at their house, and thought that if his 
system flourished, it would be in spite of the founder ; 
and some time later Emerson came to see them, and 
she went Avith him and the Brays to Stratford-on- 
Avon. "He is," she says, "the first man I have ever 
seen"; but does not expound the statement, and it 
does not appear that Emerson had any specific influ- 
ence upon her mind. Meanwhile, she had been led 
to her first important piece of literary work. An 
excursion with the Brays and Hennells was shared 
by Miss Brabant, daughter of Dr. Brabant of Devizes, 
and followed by the engagement of Miss Brabant to 



32 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

Charles Hennell. Dr. Brabant was a personal friend 
of Strauss, and his daughter had undertaken a trans- 
lation of Strauss's Life of Jesus, for which funds were 
provided by Joseph Parkes (well known as a Radical 
politician) and others. Before her marriage she gave 
up the task, which was transferred to George Eliot in 
January 1844. For the next two years George Eliot's 
energies were absorbed in this task. Translating in 
general is not very exhilarating work, nor Strauss's book 
specially exhilarating to translate. Before the book 
was finished she was often depressed, and towards the 
end thoroughly bored. She was encouraged by Sara 
Hennell when she had ceased to " sit down to Strauss 
with any relish," and was longing for proof sheets to 
convince her that her " soul-stupefying labour " would 
not be thrown away. She worked, however, in the 
most conscientious way, and finally achieved an admi- 
rable and workmanlike translation. Dull as the labour 
was, the continual effort at accurate reproduction was 
probably of some use to her English style. Whether 
her father knew of her employment, or thought that 
her churchgoing made amends for her share in propa- 
gating scepticism, is not recorded. She seems from her 
letters to have accepted Strauss's general position, 
though now and then she had qualms. She says, 
writes Mrs. Bray in 1846, that " she is Strauss-sick ; 
it makes her ill dissecting the beautiful story of the 
Crucifixion, and only the sight of the Christ image " 
(a statuette after Thorwaldsen in her study) "and 
picture made her endure it." To others the image 
might perhaps have suggested rather remonstrance 
than encouragement. The book appeared, without 
the translator's name, in June 1846. 



II.] COVENTRY 33 

Her father's health was now beginning to break, 
and her time was much occupied for tlie next three 
years by her devoted care of him. She did all 
the nursing herself, and is reported to have done it 
admirably. In the latter part of the time she found 
some distraction in beginning a translation of Spinoza's 
Tractatus Theologico-PoUticus. Her letters give a few 
indications of her thoughts upon the outward events 
of an exciting time. She sympathised- warmly with the 
French Revolution of 1848, and admired Lamartine and 
Louis Blanc. She shows, however, some misgiving, and 
is depressed by the contrast between French enthusiasts 
and their English sympathisers. Englishmen have a 
much larger proportion of " selfish radicalism and un- 
satisfied brute sensuality than of perception or desire 
of justice " ; and a revolution here would be simply 
destructive. A little later she is made melancholy 
by the tone of the newspapers about Louis Blanc : 
"The day will come when there will be a temple of 
white marble, where sweet incense and anthems shall 
rise to the memory of every man and woman who has 
had ... a clear vision of the time when this miserable 
reign of Mammon shall end," She has, she says, been 
wrought into fury " by the loathsome fawning, the 
transparent hypocrisy, the systematic giving as little as 
possible for as much as possible, that one meets with here 
at every turn. I feel that society is training men and 
women for hell." In this high-wrought and pessimistic 
frame of mind she speaks with remarkable enthusiasm 
of Rousseau and George Sand. Spite of all that may 
be said against him, Rousseau's genius has " sent that 
electric thrill through my intellectual and moral frame 
which has Avakened me to new perceptions, which has 



34 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

made man and nature a fresh world of thought and 
feeling to me ; and this not by teaching me any new 
belief." The " rushing mighty wind of his inspiration 
has so quickened my faculties that I have been able 
to shape more definitely for myself ideas which had 
previously dwelt as dim Ahnungen in my soul." George 
Sand has a similar power. " It is sufficient for me as 
a reason for bowing before her in eternal gratitude to 
that ' great power of God manifested in her ' that I 
cannot read six pages of hers without feeling that it is 
given to her to delineate human passion and its results, 
and (I must say, in spite of your judgment) some of 
the moral instincts and their tendencies, with such 
truthfulness, such nicety of discrimination, such tragic 
power, and withal such loving gentle humour, that 
one might live a century with nothing but one's own 
dull faculties and not know so much as those six pages 
will suggest." She adds that she has just acquired a 
" most delightful " De Imitatione Christi, with quaint 
woodcuts — a book which affected Maggie Tulliver in 
the same way. " It makes one long to be a saint for a 
few months. Verily, its piety has its foundations in 
the depth of the dumb human soul." One may note, 
too, in passing, her delight in Sir Charles Grandison. 
"The morality," she says, ''is perfect — there is noth- 
ing for the new lights to correct." During this period 
she must have been accumulating the experience to be 
turned to account in Middlemarch. It is curious to 
contrast the tone of that book with the passionate 
enthusiasm for such prophets of sentimentalism as 
Richardson, Rousseau, or George Sand. But of this 
I must speak hereafter. 

She was meanwhile soothing her father's last hours 



II.] COVENTRY 85 

of consciousness by reading the Waverley novels. He 
died on the 31st May 1849. " What shall I be with- 
out him ? " she asks. " It will seem as if a part of my 
moral nature were gone." Soon afterward she joined 
the Brays in a visit to the continent. They went 
through France to the North of Italy, and returned by 
Switzerland, where she remained at Geneva. There 
she stayed from July till March 1850, recovering 
strength and spirits after the long strain caused by 
her father's illness. For the greater part of the time 
she was living with M. and Mme. D'Albert, to both of 
whom she became strongly attached. M. D'Albert was 
a man of artistic tastes, and became Conservateur of 
the Athenee — the National Gallery of Geneva. He 
afterwards translated several of George Eliot's novels ; 
and the friendship lasted till the end of her life. A 
fortnight after coming to stay with them, George Eliot 
says that Mme. D'Albert makes a spoilt child of her, 
and that she already loves M. D'Albert as *' if he were 
father and brother both. It is so delightful to get 
among people who exhibit no meannesses, no worldli- 
nesses, that one may well be enthusiastic." In fact, 
she had fortunately fallen into a thoroughly congenial 
circle ; and her characteristic craving for affection had 
been satisfied by worthy objects. She admired the 
beauties of Geneva, had a little quiet and refined 
society, and left Spinoza's Tractatus on the shelf. She 
attended certain lectures of Professor De la Rive on 
" Experimental Physics," which we will hope were 
cheering, but otherwise resigned herself to judicious 
relaxation. She found, in fact, that Geneva was in 
itself superior to Coventry, though there were some 
people at Coventry " better than lake, trees, and 



36 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

mountains.'' But for them, she would think with a 
shudder of returning to England. " It looks to me 
like a land of gloom, of ennui, of platitude, but in the 
midst of all this it is the land of duty and affection ; 
and the only ardent hope I have for my future life is 
to have given to me some woman's duty, some possi- 
bility of devoting myself where I may see a daily 
result of pure calm blessedness in the life of another." 
The phrase is significant. She was now thirty years 
old, and her outlook was sufficiently vague. She had 
grown to her full intellectual stature. She had read 
widely and intelligently ; and if she had not devoted 
herself to any special line of inquiry, she was becoming 
familiar with the world of ideas which were ignored 
in the early domestic circle. So far, however, there 
is no appearance of any intention to take up original 
work. " We fancy," says Mrs. Bray in 1846, that 
" she must be writing her novel," — apparently because 
she "is looking very brilliant just now." But the 
"novel" appears to be merely conjectural, and her 
labours upon Strauss had not suggested a possibility 
of her taking up an independent part in such in- 
quiries. Her diffidence would suggest rightly or 
wrongly that she was not qualified to contribute to 
philosophical or critical literature. She was therefore 
at a loss to find any channel for the store of intel- 
lectual energy already enriched by much experience 
and reflection. A poem, written some years later, 
suggests a state of mind which may illustrate her 
position at this period. She describes a "Minor 
Prophet," a gentleman of Puritan descent who has 
taken up new ideas with the old dogmatic confidence. 
He is a phrenologist and a vegetarian, interested in 



1^ 



II.] COVENTRY 37 

'^ psychical research," and fully expecting a regenera- 
tion of the world by the adoption of scieutitic inven- 
tions and the elimination of '' faulty human types." 
She smiles sadly at the prospect, and feels ''short- 
sighted pity " for the coming man who 

" Will not know half the dear imperfect things 
That move my smiles and tears — will never know 
The fine old incongruities that raise 
My friendly laugh ;- the innocent conceits 
That, like a needless eyeglass or black patch, 
Give those who wear them harmless happiness ; 
The twists and cracks in our poor earthenware 
That touch me to more conscious fellowship 
(I am not myself the finest Parian) 
With my coevals." 

v" She goes on to explain that she is anything but 
indifferent to hopes for another future — 

" The earth yields nothing more divine 
Than high prophetic vision — than the seer 
Who, fasting from man's meaner joy, beholds 
The paths of beauteous order and constructs 
A fairer type, to shame our low content. 
But prophecy is like potential sound 
Which turned to music seems a voice sublime 
From out the soul of light, but turns to noise 
In scrannel pipes and makes all ears averse." 

She is, she would seem to intimate, distracted between 
the past and the present; between the old-fashioned 
Griff and the society of the squires and farmers, 
narrow and stupid, but somehow picturesque, cordial, 
and humorous ; and the pragmatical tiresome preacher 
of scientific or quasi-scientific " fads," who is as un- 
deniably right in his aspirations as he is intolerably 



38 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. ii. 

prosaic and harsli in his judgment of his predecessors. 
Now Mr. Bray clearly did not stand for the minor 
prophet. George Eliot was far too loyal to her 
friends not to be a little blind to their defects; and 
Bray was a man of real sense and ability. Yet the 
" minor prophet " was a kind of inferior Bray, and 
among his disciples and colleagues there were plenty 
of people who showed the ugly side of scientific 
arrogance and the readiness to substitute a tune upon 
" scrannel pipes " for the pathetic if imperfect music 
of the older creeds. George Eliot desired to sympa- 
thise with these leaders of progress, but contempt for 
the past jarred most painfully upon her feelings, and 
seemed treasonable to the best human affections. The 
intensely tender and sensitive nature which prompted 
her longing for some " Avoman's mission" made her 
shrink from too close an alliance with the iconoclasts 
who would indiscriminately condemn things sacred to 
her memory. 



CHAPTER III 

THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW 

Upon her return from Geneva, George Eliot had gone 
to the Brays, with whom she stayed for some months. 
A turning-point in her life was now to occur. The 
Westminster Review, started originally by the Bentham- 
ites in their most hopeful days, was in its normal 
state of insufficient circulation. J. S. Mill had given 
it up when the decline of the " philosophical radicals " 
made the management of their organ a thankless task. 
Since his day it had been in the hands of Mr. Hickson. 
It was now to be transferred to Mr. Chapman, who 
hoped to make it an adequate organ for the best 
liberal thought of the day. He paid a visit to the 
Brays in October 1850 with Robert William Mackay, 
an amiable and accomplished man whose chief work, 
The Progress of the Intellect, had just appeared. George 
Eliot wrote a sympathetic review of this book for the 
Westminster Review. Her article was in the number 
for January 1851, and was the first writing in which 
she attempted anything more ambitious than trans- 
lation. Mackay's aim, as she defines it, was to show 
that " divine revelation " is not to be found exclu- 
sively in the records of any one nation, " but is co- 
extensive with the history of human development." 
A phrase about the " inexorable law of consequences " 

39 



40 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

shows that she was still a disciple of Bray, who praises 
her for illustrating that " law " in her novels. She 
seems, too, to have accepted the phrenology of Combe 
and Bray, as is shown by occasional references to the 
" anterior lobes " of such great men as Dickens and 
Professor Owen, whom she was presently to see. 
Chapman finally bought the Westminste); and arranged 
that George Eliot should become assistant editor. She 
took up her duties in September 1851, and boarded 
with the Chajjmans at their house in the Strand. 
Her wide knowledge of foreign and English literature, 
her industry and willingness to perform any kind of 
drudgery, were admirable qualifications for the post. 
It might be doubted whether a young lady who had 
hitherto lived only in the provinces, and had had no 
concern in periodical literature, would possess an in- 
stinct for the qualities which secure popular success. 
That, however, would be mainly a question for the 
Editor-in-chief, and the Westminster endeavoured to 
make its way by enlisting contributors already dis- 
tinguished or soon to win distinction. The list of 
persons who were more or less interested in the under- 
taking is remarkable, and in one way or other George 
Eliot saw something of most of the writers who have 
left their mark upon the time. Some of the lights 
have paled. She is introduced to the daughter of the 
Religion of the Universe, and perhaps few readers will 
be able to say offhand that the phrase means the 
religion of Mr. Eobert Fellowes. But in many cases 
we regret that her letters, written hastily in the 
intervals of continuous labour, give us only tan- 
talising glimpses. The philosophical radicals had 
ceased to be efficient contributors. J. S. Mill, whose 



111.] THE WESTMINSTER BE VIEW 41 

position had been established by the Logic and the 
Political Economy, was at this time much of a recluse. 
He was, however, " propitiated " by Grote, who was 
" very friendly," and he contributed one article (upon 
Whewell's Moral Philosophy) of which the sub-editor 
did not think highly. Mill's early friend, William 
Ellis, of whose " apostolical labour " in trying to get 
Political Economy taught in j^i'iniary schools he spoke 
enthusiastically, was personally kind, but does not 
appear to have contributed. Carlyle, who had just 
published The Life of Sterling, and beginning to plunge 
into Frederick, was invited to denounce the peerage. 
'* Insinuating letters," offering "three other most 
glorious subjects," failed to bring him down, but he 
called and strongly, though fruitlessly, recommended 
•'Browning the poet." With Froude, then just be- 
coming a disciple of the prophet, she was more for- 
tunate. She had greatly admired the Nemesis of Faith, 
and written a notice of it for the Coventry Herald. A 
personal acquaintance had followed; and but for his 
marriage at the time, Froude would have joined the 
Brays in their trip with her to Geneva. He now 
contributed a striking article iipon the Book of Job, 
and afterwards wrote upon Spinoza. The number in 
which the "Job" appeared included contributions 
from Theodore Parker a^id Harriet Martineau. Miss 
Martineau attracted her by kindness and cordiality, 
and was an effective contributor. To James Martineau 
there are admiring references, though he generally 
wrote in other organs. Francis Newman, whom 
she had already called '• our blessed St. Francis " ; 
W. R. Greg, whose Creed of Christendom had produced 
a marked effect; W. J. Fox, the veteran radical 



42 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

author and orator; and W. E. Forster, who wrote 
an article greatly approved by her upon American 
Slavery, are other names incidentally mentioned. 
Mazzini wrote an article, pronounced by Greg to be 
'-'■ sad stuff." The most important contributor, how- 
ever, appears to have been Mr. Herbert Spencer. His 
article upon the " Universal Postulate " made a special 
impression. He had just brought out his Social Statics, 
pronounced, as she had heard, by G. H. Lewes to be 
the " best book on the subject." They rapidly became 
friends, and she declares him to be " a good, delightful 
creature." She ''always feels better for being with 
him." By Mr. Herbert Spencer she was introduced 
towards the end of 1851 to George Henry Lewes, of 
whom more must be said directly. 

Meanwhile it may be remarked that she was thus 
becoming more or less familiar with nearly all the 
eminent writers who, in one sense or other, were on 
the side of intellectual advance. They differed widely 
enough from each other, and there could hardly be a 
more fundamental contrast than that between Carlyle 
and Mr. Herbert Spencer. It was as well that she 
should learn that the Brays and Hennells, however 
excellent in their way, did not represent the only line 
of thought. She had, indeed, read too widely to be 
kept within the prison house of a single sect. One 
point may be noticed in passing, as it had a marked 
influence upon her later views. The philosophy of 
Comte was at this time attracting notice in England. 
Mill had been for a time a warm personal disciple, and 
had spoken of him with great respect in the Logic ; Miss 
Martineau was compiling an abridgment of his work ; 
and G. H. Lewes had written as an adherent of his 



»in.] THE WESTMINSTER BE VIEW 43 

doctrine. George Eliot was interested. ; and in later 
life drew nearer to the Positivist than to any other 
school. Her editorial work seems to have been ab- 
sorbing and often dispiriting. It was too much like 
flogging a dead horse. The public declined to care 
for the admirable articles addressed to them, and 
showed no very keen hankering for sound philosophy. 
She had to plod through much ponderous manuscript 
on arid topics. Her hands, she complains, are " hot 
and tremulous," while there is a " great dreary article " 
by her side asking for reading and abridgment. One 
day she has to read a review article upon taxation, to 
collate it with newspaper articles, and consider all that 
J. S. Mill says on the subject. Then Mr. Chapman 
produces a thick Germaii volume, of which she is to 
read enough to form an opinion. Mr. Lewes calls, and 
" of course sits talking till the second bell rings,'"' and 
at 11 P.M. she is still puzzling over taxation. Letters 
and callers and meetings of Associations distract her, 
and she is glad to fly for occasional relief to her friends 
at Coventry. In addition to her regular work she is 
translating Ludwig Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, 
which appeared as by " Marian Evans " (the only time 
her real name was used) in July 1854. Feuerbach 
had developed Hegelianism into naturalism, and the 
translation apparently implies an extension of George 
Eliot's anti-theological tendencies. Another book by 
her on the Idea of a Future Life was advertised, but 
never appeared. She complains of headaches and 
rheumatism ; and one is not surprised that by the end 
of 1853 she is becoming tired of it, and is giving notice 
of resignation to Mr. Chapman. She was living alone 
in lodgings, snatching brief holidays to be speiat with 



44 GEOKGE ELIOT [chap* 

the Brays, and, we may guess, feeling the want of the 
domestic circle, which, even when not intellectually 
sympathetic, had satisfied her craving for affection. 

George Henry Lewes, born in 1817, if not the pro- 
foundest reasoner, was certainly one of the most 
brilliant of the literary celebrities of the time. He 
was the grandson of a second-rate actor, and had had 
a very desultory education. The dates and facts seem 
to be rather confused. He had, it is said, passed 
through several schools, had then been a clerk in a 
merchant's oflfice, and for some time a medical student ; 
he had spent some years in France and Germany, and 
almost forgotten the use of his mother tongue. On 
'returning to England he had for a time gone upon the 
stage ; at the age of twenty he had given lectures upon 
philosophy at the chapel of W. J. Fox ; and he had 
finally settled down to Avrite books and articles on the 
most various topics. He had Avritten a play and a 
couple of novels, one of which, Rose, Blanche, and Violet, 
made something of a mark. He had written articles 
upon French and German philosophy and literature ; 
discoursed upon the Greek, Spanish, and Italian drama ; 
and criticised Browning, Tennyson, and Macaulay. 
His Biographical Historjj of Philosophy, which appeared 
in 1815 and 1846, showed that in spite of all distract- 
ing interests he thought himself qualified to expound 
ultimate truths. Learned professors who, like Sir 
William Hamilton, had spent lives upon abstruse 
metaphysical treatises, might despise the audacity 
of the young man who entered the arena with so 
slender an apparatus of learning. The brightness and 
vivacity of the book, however, and the happy intro- 
duction of the biographical element, roused the interest 



in.] THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW 45 

of ordinary readers, and perhaps persuaded some of 
them that much of the mystery in whicli the more 
ponderous philosophers wrapped themselves could be 
dispelled by a little common sense. The preface, 
indeed, announced that "■ philosophy " had had its 
day, and was to be superseded by Comte's Positivism. 
Lewes afterwards wrote the Life of Goethe, which 
though ardent Goethe worshippers may pronounce 
it to show a want of sympathy for some aspects of the 
hero, is singularly interesting and well written, and 
deserved the success which has made it a standard 
work in biography. He afterwards took to physiology, 
and after producing some popular books, approved, it 
is said, by " scientific bigwigs," proceeded to show the 
philosophical bearing of his studies in his Problems of 
Life and Mind. This was left as a fragment at his 
death. I need only say here that whatever their 
value, his later writings show the eld alertness and 
keenness of intellect and his continued interest in the 
philosophical disquisitions to which, spite of all dis- 
tractions, he was constantly recurring. 

At this time Lewes was literary editor of the 
Leader, a weekly paper representing the same ten- 
dencies as the Westminster. He was publishing a 
series of articles upon Comte, to whom he had been 
personally introduced by J. S. Mill. He was what 
is generally called a Bohemian, though always with 
a serious ambition. He could converse ably upon all 
such matters as interested literary and journalistic 
circles in London, and his wide knowledge of con- 
tinental writers gave him an authority in some matters 
not shared by many English contemporaries. He was 
a brilliant talker, fully able to turn his knowledge to 



46 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

account. His conversation abounded in lively anec- 
dotes, told with infinite zest; he was thoroughly 
genial, and ready at good-humoured repartee ; and he 
was not hampered by any excessive reverence for con- 
ventional proprieties. He was of slight figure, and, 
according to Douglas Jerrold, the "ugliest man in 
London." It would be presumptuous to express any 
opinion upon the justice of so sweeping an observation. 
But if not beautiful, he was a man to forget, and to 
induce companions to forget, any such defects. He 
had bright eyes and a fine brow, and the whole face 
and bearing was full of intelligence. A social gather- 
ing must have consisted of very ponderous interests 
if it could not be stirred into animation by a man with 
so much more quicksilver in his composition than falls 
to the lot of the average Briton. Nobody, one might 
guess, was more likely to dazzle the grave young 
lady, profoundly interested in philosophy, and anxious 
to get the newest lights in speculation, than this 
daring and brilliant writer, who knew all that was 
being done in France and Germany, and could talk 
with equal confidence upon Comte and Hegel, or upon 
the last new play or oratorio in London. She was 
apparently rather repelled by his levity at first ; but 
after a time says that he has " quite won her liking 
in spite of herself." He has had a good deal of her 
" vituperation " ; but, " like a few other people in the 
world, he is much better than he seems — a man of 
heart and conscience, wearing a mask of flippancy." 

Lewes had married in 1840. He was at this time 
living in the same house with Thornton Hunt, who 
had edited the Leader in co-operation with him. Mrs. 
Lewes preferred Thornton Hunt to her husband, 



III.] THE WEST3IIXSTEB BE VIEW 47 

to whom she had already borne children. Though 
Lewes's views of the inarriage tie were anything but 
strict, this had led some two years previously to a 
break-up of his family. A legal divorce was impos- 
sible ; but George Eliot held that the circumstances 
justified her in forming a union with Lewes, which 
she considered as equivalent to a legitimate marriage. 
I have not, and I suppose that no one now has, the 
knowledge which would be necessary for giving an 
opinion as to the proper distribution of praise and 
blame among the various parties concerned, nor shall 
I argue the ethical question raised by George Eliot's 
conduct. It may be a pretty problem for casuists 
whether the breach of an assumed moral law is aggra- 
vated or extenuated by the offender's honest conviction 
that the law is not moral at all. George Eliot at any 
rate emphatically took that position. She had long 
protested against the absolute indissolubility of mar- 
riage. She thought, we are told, that the system 
worked badly, because wives were less anxious to please 
their husbands when their position was *' invulnerable." 
She held, with Milton, that so close a tie between 
persons not united in soul was intolerable. " All self- 
sacrifice is good," she had said upon reading Jane Eyre 
in 1848, "■ but one would like it to be in a somewhat 
nobler cause than that of a diabolical law which chains 
a man body and soul to a putrefying carcase." Mrs. 
Lewes was not so bad as Mrs. Kochester, but the 
hardship was sufficient to justify an exception to the 
ordinary rule. Writing a few months after the union, 
she says that she cannot understand how any un- 
worldly unsuperstitious person, who is sufficiently 
" acquainted with the realities of life," can pronounce 



48 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

her relation to Lewes " immoral." Nothing in her 
life, she declares, has been more " profoundly serious," 
which means, it seems, that she does not approve 
"light and easily broken ties." In her writings, 
indeed, her tendency is to insist upon the sanctity of 
the traditional bonds, which, whatever their origin, 
are essential to social welfare, and so far she agrees on 
this, as on many points, with her friends the Positivists. 
Comte, though he admired the Catholic doctrine of 
the indissolubility of marriage, discovered the necessity 
for making an exception which happened to cover his 
own case. George Eliot, it seems, who had never 
accepted the strictest doctrine, was more consistent. 
ISTo one can deny that the relation to Lewes was 
'*' serious " enough in her sense. It lasted through 
their common lives, and their devotion to each other 
was unlimited, and appears only to have strengthened 
with time. She never misses an opportunity of ex- 
pressing her affection for her " husband," or her grati- 
tude for the blessings due to his devotion. Lewes 
expressed his feeling with equal emphasis. In a 
journal of 1859 he speaks of a walk with Mr. Herbert 
Spencer. Mr. Spencer's friendship had been the 
brightest ray in a very dreary " wasted period of my 
life " ; it had roused him from indifference to fresh 
intellectual interest ; but, he adds, " I owe Spencer 
another and a deeper debt. It was through him 
that I learned to know Marian — to know her was to 
love her — and since then my life has been a new 
birth. To her I owe all my prosperity and all my 
happiness. God bless her ! " Lewes, like other men 
of his buoyant temperament, was well enough satisfied 
with himself; but his vanity was made inoffenT?ive by 



III.] THE WESTJIIXSTEB BE VIEW 49 

his generosity. He recognised all talent gladly ; and 
the recognition in the case of George Eliot rose to 
enthusiastic devotion. He looked up to her as in her 
own field an entirely superior being, in the front rank 
of contemporary genius. Their house became a temple 
of a domestic worship, in which he was content to be 
the high priest of the presiding deity. He stood as 
much as possible between her and all the worries of 
the outside world. He transacted her business, wrote 
her letters, kept her from the knowledge of unpleasant 
criticism, read all her books with her as they were 
composed, made suggestions and occasional criticisms ; 
but, above all, encouraged her by hearty and sincere 
praise during the fits of depression to which she was 
constitutionally liable. She gave him the manuscripts 
of her books with inscriptions recording her gratitude, 
and the inscription in Romola may sum up her per- 
manent sentiment : " To the Husband, whose perfect 
love has been the best source of her insight and 
strength, this manuscript is given by his devoted wife, 
the writer." 

The Leweses left England together in July 1854 and 
went to Weimar, where he worked upon the Life of 
Goethe. In November they went to Berlin, and re- 
turned to England in March 1855. They saw a good 
many distinguished Germans, only one of whom 
" seemed conscious of his countrymen's deficiencies." 
They were, however, kindly received ; and George 
Eliot's intellectual horizon was no doubt widened by 
intercourse with Ranch the sculptor, Liszt the musi- 
cian, Liebig the chemist, Varnhagen von Ense, and 
others well known in various departments. She 
worked at a translation of Spinoza's Ethics, which 

E 



50 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. in. 

was never published, though much of it seems to have 
been completed. On reaching England they settled 
for a time at Richmond, and had to take seriously to 
writing. Lewes had to support his wife's children, 
and both had to depend upon their pens. Lewes was 
bringing out his Life of Goethe. George Eliot contin- 
ued her labours upon Spinoza, and contributed articles 
to the Westminster and other periodicals. She wrote 
upon Heine, Young of the Night Thoughts, Margaret 
Fuller, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and upon Dr. Gum- 
ming, who in those days was interpreting the Apo- 
calypse and thrilling simple readers by a prospect of 
the approaching battle of Armageddon. Her remarks 
upon Gumming — rather small game, it must be ad- 
mitted, for such an adversary — had one result. They 
convinced Lewes that she possessed not only great 
talent, but true genius. In 1856 the Leweses made 
some stay at Ilfracombe and Tenby, where Lewes was 
seeking materials for his Seaside Studies. Upon their 
return to Richmond in September, George Eliot at last 
took up the work by which she was to become famous. 



CHAPTER IV 

SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE 

Hitherto George Eliot, who was now thirty-six, had 
confined herself to comparatively humble work. She 
was at home in the upper sphere of philosophy and 
the historical criticism of religion ; but she was content 
to be an expositor of the vieAvs of independent thinkers. 
She had spent years of toil upon translating Strauss, 
Feuerbach, and Spinoza ; and was fully competent to 
be in intellectual communion with her friends Charles 
Bray and Mr. Herbert Spencer. It does not appear, 
however, that she ever aspired to make original 
contributions to speculative thought. The effect of 
her philosophical studies upon her imaginative work 
was very marked ; but she was not to be the first 
example of a female metaphysician of high rank.-"' She 
was only to be the first female novelist whose inspira- 
tion came in a great degree from a philosophical creed. 
I have already spoken of the apparently slow develop- 
ment of the purely artistic impulse. Most women at 
the present day begin, I believe, to write novels in 
their teens. Miss Burney made herself famous at the 
age of twenty-five by Evelina, written some years 
previously. Miss Bronte had already finished her 
brilliant career before George Eliot had begun to 
write. The most famous of her predecessors, Miss 

51 



52 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

Austen, had written stories in her childhood, though 
her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, did not appear 
till she was thirty-five. Miss Edgeworth published her 
first novel. Castle BacJcrent, at the age of thirty-three ; 
and Miss Ferrier her Marriage at the age of thirty- 
five. Mrs. Gaskell's (George Eliot's senior by ten 
years) first novel, 3Iary Barton, appeared when the 
author was thirty-eight. These precedents may per- 
haps suggest that women who have the gift have 
been often kept back by the feminine virtue of 
diffidence. Of that virtue, if it be a virtue, George 
Eliot undoubtedly possessed a large share, and the 
circumstances of her youth fostered the tendency. 
Her reverence for her intellectual guides, who were 
not much given to novel-reading and writing, would 
act in the same direction. Mr. Herbert Spencer's 
philosophy may be admirable in its own sphere, but 
is not of itself likely to stimulate an interest in 
purely imaginative work. It almost seems as if 
George Eliot would never have written a novel at 
all had it not been for the quick perception of Lewes. 
In their circumstances, too, there were sound utilitarian 
reasons for trying an experiment in the direction of 
the most profitable variety of literature. 

George Eliot indeed had always cherished a '^ vague 
dream " that some time or other she might write a 
novel. She had as yet got no further than an " intro- 
ductory chapter " descriptive of life in a Staffordshire 
village and the neighbouring farmhouses. The dream 
had died away. She became despondent of success in 
that, as in other undertakings. She thought that, 
though she could describe, she had no dramatic or 
constructive power. She happened, however, to have 



IV.] SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE 53 

the old fragment with her in Germany, and read it to 
Lewes one evening at Berlin. He shared her doubts 
as to the dramatic power ; but the ability shown in 
her other articles led him to think the experiment of 
novel-writing worth trying. One day, in a dreamy 
mood, she fancied herself writing a story to be called 
" The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton." Lewes 
was struck by the title, and encouraged her to make 
a start. " You have wit, description, and philosophy," 
he would say ; " those go a good way towards the 
j)roduction of a novel." On 22nd September she at 
last began to write. She showed the first part to 
Lewes, suggesting that it might open a series of 
sketches drawn from her observations of the clergy. 
The scene at Cross Farm convinced him that she could 
write good dialogue. It was still to be seen whether 
she had a command of pathos. This was settled by a 
chapter describing the last illness of Mrs. Barton. 
They both ''cried over it," and Lewes kissed her, 
saying, " I think your pathos is better than your 
fun." Thus encouraged, she finished the story on the 
5th of November, and next day Lewes sent the ms. 
with a note to John Blackwood. Lewes stated that 
the story, intended for the first of a series, had been 
written by a friend whose powers he had doubted. 
The doubts had been changed by the reading into " very 
high admiration." " Such humour, pathos, vivid pre- 
sentation, and nice observation," he thought, " had 
not been exhibited in this style since the Vicar of 
Wakefield.''' Blackwood answered, saying that the 
story ''would do," though making some criticisms, 
and adding that till he had seen more of the proposed 
series he could not make " any decided proposition for 



54 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

the publication of the Tales " in the Magazine. The 
rather guarded approval called forth a stronger eulogy 
from Lewes, declaring that the story showed the rarest 
of all faculties — " dramatic ventriloquism." A pub- 
lisher can hardly be expected to praise too enthusi- 
astically the wares for which he is bargaining. As 
Blackwood put it undeniably, "criticism would assume 
a much soberer tone were critics compelled seriously 
to act whenever they expressed an opinion." He 
showed his genuine opinion by accepting the story 
at once, and waiving his objection to taking it without 
seeing its successors. The confidence of Lewes's friend, 
which had been shaken, was greatly restored by this 
letter. "He" was afraid, said Lewes, of failure, and 
"by failure would understand that which I suspect 
most writers would be apt to consider as success — so 
high is his ambition. I tell you this," added Lewes, 
"that you may understand the sort of shy, shrinking, 
ambitious nature you have to deal with." The first 
part of the story accordingly appeared in Blackwood's 
Magazine in January 1857 ; and Blackwood sent fifty 
guineas and some very cordial praises in return. " Mr. 
Gilfil's Love Story " and " Janet's Repentance " ap- 
peared in the Magazine in the following months ; and 
these appeared together as Scenes of Clerical Life at the 
beginning of 1858. The name " George Eliot," under 
which these and all her later works appeared, was 
assumed, it appears, because Lewes's name was George, 
and " Eliot " was " a good mouth-filling, easily pro- 
nounced word." She had intended to continue the 
series ; but Blackwood's " want of sympathy with the 
first part" of "Janet's Repentance" had annoyed her, 
though he came round to admiration of the third 



IV.] SCEXES OF CLEBICAL LIFE 55 

part. She wound up the book, therefore, and in 
October began a more elaborate work. 

The Scenes of Clerical Life soon attracted notice, 
thougli the quiet tone was hardly calculated to pro- 
duce an instantaneous success of the startling kind. 
Copies of the collective edition Avere sent to Froude, 
Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Ruskin, Faraday, 
Helps, Albert Smith, and Mrs. Carlyle. Mrs. Carlyle 
wrate warmly, and declared in Carlylean phrase that 
" it was a human book, written out of the heart of a 
man, not merely out of the brain of an author, full 
of tenderness and pathos, without a scrap of senti- 
mentality, of sense without dogmatism, of earnestness 
without twaddle — a book that makes one feel friends 
at once and for always Avith the man or woman who 
wrote it." Carlyle, she added, had promised for once 
to break his rule of never reading novels Avhen he 
should emerge from Frederick. Froude was also 
cordial, but the most enthusiastic praise came from 
Dickens. He had never, he declared, seen the like of 
the "exquisite truth and delicacy both of the humour 
and pathos of these stories." Upon another point 
Dickens showed a keener insight than other writers. 
In spite of the assumed name, he thought that the 
author must be a woman. If not, " no man ever 
before had the art of making himself so like a woman 
since the world began." Mrs. Carlyle suggested a 
more complex hypothesis, such as is often put forward 
in the regions of the " higher criticism." The author 
might be first cousin to a clergyman, with a wife from 
whom he had got the " beautiful feminine touches." 
Thackeray, it was reported, though he " spoke highly " 
of the book, thought that the author was a man, 



66 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

which, if true, gives a superfluous proof that even 
the hnest critics are fallible. Meanwhile, it seems 
that certain touches in the book had convinced George 
Eliot's old neighbours that the author came from their 
district. The Scenes, as she admitted soon afterwards, 
contained " portraits," a mistake which should not 
occrir again, and was due to the fact that her " hand 
was not well in." The plots, too, were more or less 
reproductions of remembered incidents. Milly Barton, 
we are told, is the wife of a Mr. Gwyther, curate 
of Chilvers-Coton. He died when George Eliot was 
sixteen, and was a fi-iend of Mrs. Robert Evans, who 
appears in the story as ]\Irs. Hacket. A persecution of 
a clergyman, like that upon which JaneVs Repentance 
turns, really took place, though she filled in details 
from imagination. Mr. GilfiVs Love Story was a more 
interesting application of the same method. Sir 
Christopher and Lady Cheverel represent Sir Roger 
and Lady Newdigate. The Newdigates had taken 
charge of a girl called Sally Shilton, daughter of a 
collier on the property, who had given promise of 
musical talent. They had her trained as a singer ; and 
when ill-health forced her to give up the attempt, they 
continued their protection. She married a Mr. Ebdell, 
vicar of Chilvers-Coton (the " Shepperton " of the 
story), in 1801, and died twenty-two years later. Sir 
Roger's heir, Charles Parker, died suddenly, when 
Sally was a little over twenty, in 1795. George Eliot, 
who must have learned the facts from family tradition, 
converted Sally Shilton into Caterina Sarti, by way of 
explaining her musical talent as a case of " heredity," 
and then invented the love affair with Captain 
A^'ybrow, who takes the place of Charles Parker. 



IV.] SCEXES OF CLEBICAL LIFE 57 

Thus a very touching and consistent love story is 
based upon a true history, though Charles Parker in 
his new character has to be guilty of a thoughtless 
flirtation in which he never indulged, and Sally Shilton 
is sentenced to a shorter life than she really enjoyed. 
The representatives of the ISTewdigate family seem to 
have regarded this adaptation of their family history 
as rather impertinent; and though Sir Christopher is 
admitted to be an admirable portrait of Sir Roger, we 
are assured that other persons concerned were better 
than their representatives. As George Eliot must 
have learned the story from common talk, and given a 
more distinct colouring to it from her familiarity with 
Arbury House and the family portraits, and then 
modified the characters so as to make them work out 
the story effectively, the deviation from literal truth 
will not scandalise those who have not the honour to 
be Newdigates. To them the interest lies in the skill 
with which these childish recollections have been con- 
verted into one of the most charming of stories. The 
critic of this first book might perhaps be content with 
saying ditto to Lewes, Mrs. Carlyle, and Dickens. At 
most he might be inclined to make a few deductions 
from the superlatives which are natural, or, one would 
rather say, commendable in an enthusiastic recognition 
of a new writer of genius. Some defects perhaps show 
that the writer had not yet acquired a full command 
of her art. In writing to Blackwood, she says that 
her " scientific illustrations [in Amos Barton'] must be 
a fault, since they seem to have obtruded themselves 
disagreeably on one of my readers." She declares her 
innocence of any but a superficial knowledge of science. 
The one reader showed some acuteness, for the 



58 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

scientific allusions are not yet so prominent as they 
came to be in her later style. In the society of 
Lewes and his friends a scientific allusion, which might 
alarm the average reader of a magazine, would no 
doubt pass for commonplace. George Eliot's environ- 
ment was always so scientific and philosophical that 
it would have been difficult to be quite free from the 
taint. The weakness does not imply affectation, and 
should be taken as an implied, if undeserved, compli- 
ment to the reader's intelligence. Blackwood seems 
to have been vexed by a different indication of defective 
skill in this story. He did not like the '' wind up," and 
thought that there was "too minute a specification " of 
the children who gather round Milly Barton's deathbed, 
and of other persons not previously introduced. I con- 
fess that, as the story now stands, I see no force in this 
criticism ; but it may, I think, be said that it marks 
a slight awkwardness. George Eliot, it would seem, 
wanted to draw a portrait of the rustic society, and 
she wanders a little from the main situation in search 
of characteristic touches. The description of the 
clerical dinner party seems to be dragged in merely 
for the purpose of describing different types of clergy- 
men ; and here, and in the rather irrelevant Mr. 
Farquhar, we probably have some of the undesirable 
portraits from life. If this be true, and I only pre- 
tend to speak for myself, the weakness entirely dis- 
appears in 3/r. GUfiVs Love Story. That appears to be 
almost faultless, and as admirable a specimen of the 
literary genus to which it belongs as was ever written. 
Janefs Repeyitance is to me less pleasing for a differ- 
ent reason. The coarse attorney, Dempster, to whom 
Janet is made a victim, is undoubtedly drawn with 



IV.] SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE 59 

great vigour, and is perhaps one of the characters which 
convinced readers that his creator must be of his own 
sex. Lady novelists are not generally familiar with 
such blackguards. Janet, however, is so charming as 
to make her subjection to the snuffy, brandy-smelling, 
vi^ife-beating bully a little too repulsive ; and, more- 
over, I fancy that a really sharp lawyer would have 
found some less clumsy methods of insulting the 
evangelical clergyman. With all her keenness of 
observation, George Eliot seems to be getting a little 
beyond her tether when she enters the bar of the " Red 
Lion." 

It is, however, needless to insist upon trifling short- 
comings, except as they may indicate limitations to be 
displayed hereafter. The stories have a very definite, 
and, in spite of certain prejudices suggested by the 
word, a very legitimate moral. Amos Barton, she 
admits, is an extremely commonplace person — so 
commonplace, indeed, as Blackwood put it, that the 
" asinine stupidity of his conduct about the Countess " 
disposes one " to kick him." Commonplace people, 
she observes, have consciences and " sublime prompt- 
ings to do the painful right" ; they have their unspoken 
sorrows and their sacred joys ; their hearts have per- 
haps " gone out towards their firstborn, and they have 
mourned over the irreclaimable dead. . . . Depend 
upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you would 
learn with me to see some of the poetry and the 
patlios, the tragedy and comedy, lying in the ex- 
perience of a human soul that looks out through dull 
grey eyes and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary 
tones." In a letter written after her next book, she 
gives her theory : " If art does not enlarge men's 



60 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

sympathies, it does nothing morally. . . . The only 
effect I ardently long to produce by my writings is 
that those who read them should be better able to 
imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who 
differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact 
of being struggling, erring human creatures." This is 
apparently meant to meet some remonstrance against 
her recognition of good qualities in characters regarded 
by her freethinking friends as embodiments of super- 
stitious bigotry. The desire to rouse sympathy for 
figures who at first sight repel the more cultivated and 
intelligent is the motive of these stories. Amos 
Barton, who represents sheer crass stupidity, and Mr. 
Gilfil, who, to outward appearance, is the old high-and- 
dry parson, respected by his ''bucolic parishioners" 
for his general shrewdness and special knowledge of 
shorthorns, and by the squires for his youthful per- 
formances in the hunting field, and Mr. Tryan, to 
whom the evangelicism of Wilberforce and NeAvton 
represents the most exalted form of religion, have all 
had their romances, indicative of true and tender 
natures beneath the superficial crust of old-fashioned 
oddities. It is the especial function of the genuine 
humorist to make such revelations. Sir Roger de 
Coverley and Parson Adams and Uncle Toby and 
Dominie Sampson and Colonel Newcome have this 
much in common that the lovable in them is brought 
into relief by the superficial oddities ; and George 
Eliot is only following with more consciousness the 
path which had been indicated by many predecessors 
of genius. One of whom she always spoke with 
marked affection was Goldsmith. I remember (it 
is one of my few reminiscences) to have heard her 



IV.] SCEXES OF CLERICAL LIFE 61 

speaking with enthusiasm of the Vicar of Wakefield, 
and, if my memory be correct, contrasting it with 
Paul et Virginie, much to the advantage of the British 
author. The Vicar, she hekl, represented the most 
wholesome vein in the sentimentalism of the period. 
I dislike attempts to class literary masterpieces " in 
order of merit," and I need not here ask what are the 
qualities to which Goldsmith's inimitable work owes 
its lasting charm. I think in any case that there is 
something characteristic in George Eliot's admiration 
of a book in which the pathos is made effective by a 
combination of the tenderest feeling with the most 
exquisite literary tact ; and in which we can indulge 
"great dispositions to cry " without the sense that the 
crying would have an absurd side. The vicar, how- 
ever, differs from George Eliot's clergy in this respect 
(as in many others) that he lives in an idyllic world. 
Wakefield has, I believe, been identified with some 
actual locality ; but I fancy that it is really in some 
Arcadia, not to be approached by any boat or railway ; 
and Shepperton, on the contrary, is clearly Chilvers- 
Coton in Warwickshire, and the inhabitants were but 
modifications of real people. IMiss jNIitford's Village, 
which made her reputation in the year of George 
Eliot's birth, is a description of Three Mile Cross in 
Berkshire ; and Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford, which was 
contributed in 1851 to Dickens's Household Words, 
describes tlie little town of Knutsford. Both of them 
are very charming in widely different ways ; and in 
them, as, of course, in Miss Austen, George Eliot had 
precedents for her choice of a subject. What is 
characteristic is the tone of feeling and the power of 
the execution. Dickens's appreciation is the more 



62 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

creditable to him because the work, is conspicuous by 
its freedom from his besetting faults. The humour 
is perfectly unforced, and shows the comic side of 
prosaic commonplace without a touch of grotesque 
extravagance, and the pathos is made to tell by 
scrupulous self-restraint. Milly Barton dies in the 
presence of her husband and children, and we are 
never crossed by the thought which disturbs so many 
deathbeds in fiction, that she is somehow conscious of 
an audience applauding her excellence in the part. 
The situations are simple, and the effect is produced 
by what we can recognise as the natural development 
of the characters involved. And this is the indication 
of a profoundly reflective intellect, which contemplates 
the little dramas performed by commonplace people 
as parts of the wider tragi-comedy of human life ; and 
the village communities, their thoughts and customs, 
as subordinate elements in the great " social organism." 
The reflections suggested by Caterina's troubles may 
illustrate the remark: "When this poor little heart 
was being bruised with a weight too heavy for it, 
Nature was holding on her calm inexorable way, in 
unmoved and terrible beauty. The stars were rush- 
ing in their eternal courses ; the tides swelled to the 
level of the last expectant weed ; the sun was making 
brilliant day to the busy nations on the other side of 
the swift earth. The stream of human thought was 
hurrying and broadening onward. The astronomer 
was at his telescope ; the great ships were labouring 
over the waves ; the toiling eagerness of commerce, 
the fierce spirit of revolution, were only ebbing in 
brief rest; and sleepless statesmen were dreading the 
possible crisis of the morrow. What were our little 



IV.] SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE 63 

Tina and lier trouble in this mighty torrent, rushing 
from one awful unknown to another ? Lighter than 
the smallest centre of quivering life in the w^ater-clrop, 
hidden and uncared for as the pulse of anguish in the 
breast of the tiniest bird that has fluttered down to 
its nest with the long-sought food, and has found the 
nest empty and torn." 

This may recall the famous passage in Carlyle's 
French Revolution, speaking of the fall of the Bastille. 
It may be that a too frequent and explicit suggestion 
of such reflections would become tiresome. That 
criticism cannot, I think, be applied to anything in 
the Scenes of Clerical Life. It is the constant, though 
not obtrusive, suggestion of the depths below the 
surface of trivial life which gives an impressive dignity 
to the work; and, in any case, marks one most dis- 
tinctive characteristic of George Eliot's genius. 



CHAPTER V 

ADA3r BEDE 

The diffidence from which George Eliot suffered 
happily took the form of prompting to conscientious 
workmanship. As Lewes said, she was " ambitious " 
as well as " shy." That she aimed at so high a mark 
showed a consciousness of great powers, but not an 
equal confidence that they could be brought to bear 
upon the task. A genuine success could only be 
reached by a strenuous application on a well-con- 
sidered scheme. The little discouragement of Black- 
wood's inadequate appreciation of Janefs Repen- 
tance only induced her to take a larger canvas, which 
would give room for a fuller manifestation of her 
genius. She finished Janefs Repentance on 9th Oc- 
tober 1857, and began Adam Bede on 22nd October. 
She completed the first volume by the following March; 
wrote the second during a following tour in Germany; 
and after returning to England at the beginning 
of September, completed the third volume on 16th 
November. It was published in the beginning of 
1858. When recording these dates in her journal 
she gives also an interesting account of the genesis 
of the book. It was suggested by an anecdote which 
she had heard from an aunt, the Methodist preacher, 
Mrs. Samuel Evans. Mrs. Evans, she says, was a 

64 



CHAP, v.] ADA3f BEDE 65 

" very small, black-eyed woman, who in the days of 
her strength could not rest without exhorting and 
remonstrating in season and out of season." She had 
become much gentler when, at the age of about sixty, 
she visited Griff and made the acquaintance of her niece. 
She was very " loving and kind " ; and the niece, then 
under twenty, given to strict reticence about her 
'•' inward life," was encouraged to confide in her aunt. 
This, as already quoted, shows the affectionate relation- 
ship which sprang up. They only met twice afterwards, 
and Mrs. Evans died in 1849. The anecdote which 
Mrs. Evans had told was of a girl who was hanged 
for child-murder. Mrs. Evans had passed a night in 
prayer with her and induced her to make a confession. 
She afterwards accompanied the criminal in the cart 
to the place of execution. George Eliot had been 
deeply affected by this account, and while writing 
her first story spoke of it to Leaves. He observed, 
with his keen eye to business, that the prison scene 
would make an effective incident in a story. The 
novel was accordingly worked out with a view to this 
climax. Mrs. Evans was transformed into Dinah 
Morris, though materially altered in the process. The 
child-murder implies the seducer, Arthur Donnithorne, 
and the true lover, Adam Bede. For Adam Bede, 
she took her father as in some degree the model, 
though again carefully avoiding direct portraiture. 
These points established, the general situation is 
defined, and the development follows simply and 
naturally. Lewes was responsible for two important 
points. He was convinced by the first three chapters 
that Dinah Morris would be the centre of interest for 
readers. She had there been introduced as preaching 



00 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

and receiving an offer of marriage from Seth Bade. 
He inferred that she should be the " principal figure 
at the last"; and the remainder of the story was 
written with this end "constantly in view." Lewes's 
other remark was that Adam Bede was becoming too 
passive. He ought to be brought into more direct 
collision with Arthur Donnithorne. George Eliot was 
impressed by this suggestion ; and one night, while 
listening to "William Tell" at the Munich Opera, the 
fight between the two lovers came upon her as a 
"necessity." An account of the way in which a work 
of genius has been created is always interesting; and 
in this case, I think that it helps to explain some 
important characteristics of the story. 

Aclcun Bede, whatever else may be said of it, placed 
the author in the first rank of the "Victorian" 
novelists. Some of us can still look back with fond- 
ness to the middle of the last century, and recall the 
period which seems — to our old-fashioned tastes at 
least — to have been a flowering time of genius. Within 
a few years on either side of 1850 many great lights 
of literature arose or culminated. By David Copper- 
afield, which appeared in 1850, Dickens's popular empire, 
one may say, was finally established ; and if his best 
work was done, his admirers steadily increased in 
number. Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Peiidennis, Esmond, 
and The Neivcomes came out between 1847 and 1855. 
Miss Bronte's short and most brilliant apparition lasted 
fronr 1847 to 1853. The versatile Bulwer \vas open- 
ing a new and popular vein by The Caxtons and My 
Novel in 1850 and 1853, preaching sound domestic 
morality and omitting the True and the Beautiful. 
All Charles Kingsley's really powerful works of fiction 



V,] ADAM BEDE 67 

— Alton Locke, Yeast, Hypatia, and Westward Ho ! — 
appeared between 1850 and 1855. Mrs. Gaskell had 
first made a mark by Mary Barton in 1818, which was 
followed by Cranford and North and South, the last in 
1855. Trollope, after some failures, was beginning to 
set forth the humours of Barsetshire by the Warden in 
1855 ; and Charles Reade became a popular novelist 
by Christie Johnstone in 1853, and Xever too late to Mend 
in 1856. In 1855, I may add, Mr. George Meredith's 
Shaving of Shagpat was praised and reviewed by George 
Eliot ; but the author had long to w^ait for a general 
recognition of his genius. Anyhow, an ample and 
attractive feast was provided for those who had the 
good fortune to be at the novel-reading age in the 
fifties. The future historian of literature may settle 
to his own satisfaction what was the permanent value 
of the different stars in this constellation, and what 
was the relation which George Eliot was to bear to 
her competitors. He will no doubt analyse the spirit 
of the age and explain how the novelists, more or less 
unconsciously, reflected the dominant ideas which were 
agitating the social organism. I am content to say 
that a retrospect, colored perhaps by some personal 
illusion, seems to suggest a very comfortable state of 
things. People, we are told, were absurdly optimistic 
in those days ; they had not learned that the universe 
was out of joint, and were too respectable to look into 
the dark and nasty sides of human life. The genera- 
tion which had been in its ardent youth during the 
Reform of 1832 believed in progress and expected the 
millennium rather too confidently. It liked plain 
common-sense. Scott's romanticism and Byron's 
sentimentalism represented obsolete phases of feeling. 



68 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

and suggested only burlesque or ridicule. The 
novelists were occupied in constructing a most elabo- 
rate panorama of the manners and customs of their 
own times with a minuteness and psychological 
analysis not known to their predecessors. Their work 
is, of course, an implicit " criticism of life.'"' Thack- 
eray's special bugbear, snobbism, represents the effete 
aristocratic prejudices out of which the world was slowly 
struggling. Dickens applied fiction to assail the abuses 
which were a legacy from the old order — debtors' 
prisons, and workhouses, and Yorkshire schools, and 
the "circumlocution office." The "social question" 
was being treated by Kingsley and Mrs. Gaskell. 
But little was said which had any direct bearing upon 
those religious or philosophical problems in which 
George Eliot was especially interested. The novelists 
when they approach such topics speak with sincere 
respect of religious belief, though they obviously hold 
also that true Christianity is something very different 
from the creeds which are nominally accepted by the 
churches. They regard such matters as generally 
outside of their sphere, and simply accept the view of 
the sensible layman with a prejudice against bigotry 
and priestcraft. Here was one special province for 
the new Avriter. George Eliot alone came to fiction 
from philosophy. She was, as we have sufficiently 
seen, familiar with the speculations of her day, and 
had accepted the most advanced rationalist opinions. 
But, on the other hand, she had a strong religious 
sentiment which asserted itself the more as she 
abandoned the dogmatic system. She puts this em- 
phatically in her letters at the time. She had, as 
she tells M. D'Albert in 1859, abandoned the old spirit 



v.] ADAM BEDE 69 

of " antagonism " which had possessed her ten years 
before. She now sympathises with " any faith in which 
human sorrow and human longing for purity have 
expressed themselves." She thinks, too, that Chris- 
tianity is the highest expression of the religious 
sentiment that has yet found its place in the history 
of mankind, and has the " profoundest interest in the 
inward life of sincere Christians in all ages." She has 
ceased, she says a little later, to have any sympathy 
with freethinkers as a class, and holds that a " spiritual 
blight comes with no faith." It is characteristic that 
Buckle, who was startling the world at this time, 
inspires her with '' personal dislike," as '' an irreligious 
conceited man." It is therefore intelligible that she 
should take a Methodist preacher for her centre of 
interest. Methodism, she says, in the opening of 
Adam Bede, was a " rudimentary culture " for the 
simple peasantry ; it " linked their thoughts with the 
past," and " suffused their souls with the sense of a 
pitying, loving, infinite presence, sweet as summer to 
the houseless needy." Methodism, to some of her 
readers, may mean " low-pitched gables up dingy 
streets, sleek grocers, sponging preachers, and hypo- 
critical jargon — elements which are regarded as an 
exhaustive analysis of Methodism in many fashionable 
quarters." Certainly that would be true of readers of 
Dickens. Stiggins and Chadband and their like were 
wonderful caricatures, but imply a very summary 
" analysis." The difference is significant. George 
Eliot had gone much further than Dickens in explicit 
rejection of the popular religion, considered as a 
system of doctrine ; but she found her ideal heroine in 
one of its typical representatives. 



70 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

If, therefore, we accept the author's view, Adam 
Bede is to derive its main interest from Dinah Morris. 
Her sermon at the opening is to strike the keynote ; 
and we are to share the impression which it makes 
upon Seth Bede, that " she 's too good and holy for 
any man, let alone me." This view of the book did 
not strike everybody. The Saturday Review con- 
tained a " laudatory " but " characteristic criticism," 
" Dinah," she exclaims, " is not mentioned ! " It is 
" characteristic," no doubt, because in those days the 
/Saturday Review, though it had a most brilliant staff 
of writers, was not distinguished by "enthusiasm," 
and would be least of all inclined to expend enthusiasm 
upon a Methodist preacher. There is, we know, a 
class of beings which has a natural antipathy to holy 
water. Perhaps it is due to some such weakness that 
I must confess to a certain sympathy with that un- 
lucky reviewer. Undoubtedly, Dinah Morris is not 
only an elaborate, but a most skilful and loving 
portrait of a beautifid soul. Reading the book care- 
full}^, one must admit that she performs her part 
admirably. She shows unerring delicacy and nobility 
of feeling; and her sermons are expositions of that 
side of her creed which clearly ought to appeal to 
one's better nature. I fully admit, therefore, that I 
ought to accept Seth Bede's estimate, and to fall in 
love with this undeniable saint, if indeed my reverence 
ought not to be too strong to admit of love. My 
failure to do my duty in this respect may possibly 
be shared by some fellow-sinners. It is true, I think, 
though perhaps lamentable, that perfect characters in 
fiction have a tendency to be insipid. One wants 
some little touch of frailty to convince one that they 



v.] ADAM BEDE 71 

are really human. It was strange, said George Eliot, 
that people should fancy that she had " copied " 
Dinah Morris's sermons and prayers, when they were 
really " written with hot tears as they surged up in 
her own mind." They have no doubt the earnestness 
of genuine feeling. And yet to me that accounts for 
one characteristic without quite justifying it. Mrs. 
Samuel Evans had, one may assume, the defects 
incident to her position. She must have been pro- 
vincial and ignorant, and the beautiful soul shone 
through an imperfect medium. George Eliot, in 
modifying or, as she thought, entirely changing the 
'' individuality," has deprived her heroine of the 
colouring which would make her fully harmonise 
with her surroundings. She is a little too good not 
only for Seth but for this world, and I have a diffi- 
culty in obeying the summons to fall upon my knees 
and worship. 

People of happier constitution must accept this as 
a confession. I only wish to explain why I feel my- 
self to be rather at cross purposes with my author, 
and to admit that the criticism Avhich I am about 
to make may, if not erroneous, be based upon partly 
insufficient reasons. That criticism is briefly that 
the development of the story does not quite follow 
the lines required by the reader's sympathies. The 
main situation naturally reminds one of Scott's Heart 
of Midlotliian. Both novels turn upon an accusation of 
child-murder, and Jeanie and Effie Deans correspond 
roughly to Dinah Morris and Hetty Sorrel. To '• com- 
pare " the two, except by admitting that they are both 
masterpieces in different styles, would be absurd : 
both in their strength and their weakness they are 



72 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

obviously to be judged by different standards ; and 
I only speak of Scott because his story suggests one 
significant difference. The interest of the Heart of 
Midlothian culminates in the trial scene where Jeanie 
Deans has to make the choice between telling the 
fatal truth or saving her sister by perjury. Scott 
treats it magnificently in his own way by broad 
masculine touches. One advantage is naturally offered 
by the facts from which he started. Jeanie Deans is 
exposed to a tremendous ordeal, which brings out 
most effectively her character, and involves a true 
tragical catastrophe. The scene in the prison, which, 
as George Eliot tells us, was to be the climax of Adam 
Bede, is curiously wanting in impressiveness of this 
nature. Poor helpless little Hester Sorrel has been 
convicted of murder, and expects to be hanged next 
day. Dinah Morris goes to her in order to persuade 
her to make a confession. From the point of view 
of the persons concerned that was no doubt a very 
desirable result. But it does not in the least matter 
to the story, as Hetty's guilt has been already 
conclusively proved. Neither is it a result which 
requires any great ability for its achievement. Hetty 
is anything but a criminal who would make a point 
of "dying game." She is a most pathetic figure, 
bewildered, deserted, and in immediate prospect of 
the gallows ; and is quite unable to make any op- 
position to the woman who comes to her with the 
first message of love from outside her prison. To 
have failed to extract a confession from her would 
have shown a singular want of capacity in her spiritual 
guide. One would have expected that a humdrum 
gaol chaplain, or a rough revivalist with threats of 



v.] ADA3I BEDE 73 

hell-fire, could equally have accomplished that end. 
Dinah Morris undoubtedly does her duty with admi- 
rable tact and tenderness, and shows herself to be — 
what we know her to be — a woman with a beautiful 
soul. The result, however, is that the real interest 
of the scene is with the pathetic criminal, and not 
with the admirable female confessor. The story of 
Hetty's wanderings in search of her seducer is told 
with inimitable force and pathos; and we are not 
surprised to learn that it was written continuously 
under the influence of strong feeling. Hetty moves 
us to the core. Dinah Morris, on the other hand, 
instead of forming the real centre of interest, is a most 
charming person, who looks in occasionally, and acts 
as an edifying and eloquent chorus to comment upon 
the behaviour of the people in whom we are really 
interested. The last book, therefore, comes upon us, 
if we take this view, as superfluous and rather unplea- 
sant. Hetty is despatched to Botany Bay, and we 
are suddenly invited to be interested in a new love 
affair, when we discover that the saint is not above 
marrying, and that Adam Bede, who up to this time 
has been passionately in love with Hetty, can be sen- 
sible enough to discover the merits of her antithesis. 
The tragedy is put aside ; all the unpleasant results 
are swept away as carefully as possible ; and everything 
is made to end happily in the good old fashion. 

I cannot, therefore, accept Adam Bede as centred 
upon this religious motive. On that assumption it 
ought to have been called Dinah Morris ; and the 
other characters should have been interesting as 
transmitting or resisting the grace which inspires 
her. But there all hostile criticism may end. I 



74 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

can be unfeignedly grateful to the beautiful Methodist 
for introducing rae to a delightful circle, who were 
evoked from George Eliot's early memories. If they 
won't stay in the background, I am all the better 
pleased. Adam Bede himself is, one is forced to 
guess, a closer portrait of her father than she in- 
tended. We are told that an old friend of Eobert 
Evans had the story read to him, and sat up for 
hours to listen to descriptions which he recognised, 
exclaiming at intervals : " Tliat 's Robert, that 's Rob- 
ert to the life ! " No doubt an ordinary reader exag- 
gerates superficial resemblances, and is blind to more 
refined differences which seem all-important to the 
writer. That the father was one model is undis- 
puted ; and one remark is suggested by the portrait, 
namely, that in spite of her learning and her philoso- 
phy, George Eliot is always pre-eminently feminine. 
The Scenes of Clerical Life suggested, as we have seen, 
a dispute as to the sex of the author. Now that we 
know, we can, of course, see that others ought to 
have showed Dickens's penetration. There is always, 
I fancy, a difference which should be perceptible to 
acute critics. INIen draAvn by women, even by the 
ablest, are never quite of the masculine gender. They 
may, indeed, be admirable portraits, but still portraits 
drawn from outside. In each of the clerical stories, 
the official heroes are men — Amos Barton, Gilfil, and 
Tryan. But in each of them the women — Milly and 
Caterina and Janet — are drawn with a more intimate 
sympathy ; and though a man might have been author 
of the heroes, no man, as we may safely say now, 
could have described the heroines. Adam Bede is 
a most admirable portrait ; but we can, I think, see 



v.] ADAM BEDE 75 

clearly enough that he always corresponds to the view 
which an intelligent daughter takes of a respected 
father. That is, perhaps, the way in which one 
would like to have one's portrait taken ; but one is 
sensible that the likeness though correct is not quite 
exhaustive. One characteristic point is the kind of 
resentment with which the true woman contemplates 
a man iinduly attracted by female beauty. Adam 
Bede's passion for Hetty produces an exposition of 
the theory : " How pretty the little puss looks in that 
odd dress ! It would be the easiest folly in the world 
to fall in love with her," with her " sweet baby-like 
roundness," " the delicate dark rings of hair," and 
the " great dark eyes with their long eyelashes." 
" What a prize the man gets who wins a sweet bride 
like Hetty ! " " The dear, young, round, soft, flexible 
thing!". A man is conscious of being a great "physi- 
ognomist " under such circumstances, and thinks that 
" Nature has written out his bride's character for him 
in those exquisite lines of cheek and lip and chin, 
in those eyelids delicate as petals, in those long 
lashes curled like the stamen of a flower, in the dark 
liquid depths of those wonderful eyes ! " That was 
the way in which Adam Bede reasoned, poor man ! 
George Eliot knows better, and suspects "that there 
is no direct correlation between eyelashes and morals ; 
or else, that the eyelashes express the disposition of 
the fair one's grandmother, w^hich is on the whole less 
important to us." In fact, as she truly remarks, 
" it is generally the feminine eye that first detects the 
moral deficiencies hidden under the ' dear deceit ' of 
beauty," and Mrs. Poyser is not to be hoodwiriked. 
" She 's no better than a peacock, as 'ud strut about on 



76 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

the wall, and spread its tail when the sun shone if all 
the folks i' the parish was dying : there 's nothing 
seems to give her a turn i' th' inside, not even when 
we thought Totty had tumbled into the pit." Mrs. 
Poyser, no dovibt, is as right as usual, and the remark, 
indeed, had been made, like most others, by satirists 
of both sexes ; but it is specially congenial to the 
feminine mind. Miss Bronte, for example, looks on 
with similar indignation at the dulness of man when 
" Dr. John " in ViUette is attracted by the frivolous 
Ginevra Fanshawe. George Eliot had an eye for the 
" kitten-like " beauty of brainless young women, and 
her power over the male sex is described as a sort of 
natural perversity. " Every man who is not a monster, 
a mathematician, or a mad philosopher," she says in 
Amos Barton, " is the slave of some woman or other," 
and we must confess the undeniable truth. Strong 
men do fall in love with pretty fools. Perhaps Ave are 
not as much ashamed of it as we should be. Hetty 
is made so thoroughly charming in her way that we 
sympathise with Adam Bede's love for her, and are 
quite aware that many precedents might be adduced 
for him since the time of Samson. George Eliot thinks 
it necessary to apologise, by showing eloquently that 
feminine beauty may affect a strong man like music ; 
and to remonstrate in rather superfluous irony with 
the sensible people who despise such weaknesses. No 
apology is necessary. Rather we see the point of 
Lewes's suggestion. We can perceive that the real 
danger was that Adam might be too " passive." His 
love for Hetty, we might fancy, is to be passed over 
as if it were a painful admission of imperfect sanity. 
Luckily the fight with Arthur Donnithorne, when the 



v.] ADAM BEDE 77 

flirtation begins to excite suspicion, reassures us. It 
shows that Adam can really be as great a fool as he 
ought to be ; and afterwards when the whole story 
comes to light, his agony is as genuine and forcible 
as we can desire. Adam, in fact, is powerfully 
drawn from the striking scene, when he sits up at 
night to finish the coffin left by his drunken father 
and hears the mysterious stroke of the willow wand 
which intimates that the father is being drowned, 
down to the last interview with Hetty after her con- 
viction. The character reacts, as we feel that it ought 
to react, under the given circumstances. If his later 
discovery of Dinah's merits does not strike us quite in 
the same way, we must sorrowfully admit that it is 
possible. Men do become commonplace and reasonable 
as they grow older. 

MeauAvhile, though I have spoken of Adam Becle 
from the point of view suggested by the author's 
theory, it is neither Dinah Morris nor Adam himself 
who really made the fortune of the book. Adam Bede 
for most of us means pre-eminently Mrs. Poyser. Her 
dairy is really the centre of the whole microcosm. 
We are first introduced to it as the background which 
makes the " kitten-like " beauty of Hester Sorrel irre- 
sistible to young Captain Donnithorne. But Mrs. 
Poyser is the presiding genius. She represents the 
very spirit of the place ; and her influence is the 
secret of the harmony of the little world of squire and 
parson and parish clerk and schoolmaster and black- 
smith and carpenter and shepherd and carter. Each 
of these types is admirably sketched in turn, but the 
pivot of the whole is the farm in which Mrs. Poyser 
displays her conversational powers. The little rustic 



78 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

world is painted in colours heightened by affection. 
There is, it may be, a little more of Goldsmith's 
beautifying touch than of Crabbe's uncompromising 
realism. But it is marvellously life-like, and Mrs. 
Poyser's delightful shrewdness seems to guarantee the 
fidelity of the portraits. She has no humbug about her, 
and one naturally takes it for granted that they must 
be as she sees them. It is, indeed, needless to insist 
upon her excellence ; for Mrs. Poyser became at once 
one of the immortals. She was quoted by Charles 
Buxton — as George Eliot was pleased to hear — in the 
House of Commons before she had been for three 
months before the public : *' It wants to be hatched 
over again, and hatched different." One is glad to 
know that Mrs. Poyser's wit was quite original. "1 
have no stock of proverbs in my memory," said George 
Eliot ; " and there is not one thing put into Mrs. 
Poyser's mouth that is not fresh from my own mint." 
She had written the dialogue with obvious enjoyment, 
and appreciated its merits herself. ''You're mighty 
fond o' Craig," Mrs. Poyser had said " in confidence to 
her husband " ; " but for my part, I think he 's welly 
like a cock as thinks the sun 's rose o' purpose to hear 
him crow." She said it to other people, it seems, for 
Mr. Irwine quotes the remark to his mother as one of 
the ''capital things " he has heard her say. " That is 
an ^sop's fable in a sentence," he adds ; and he 
remarks that Mrs. Poyser is " quite original in her 
talk, one of the untaught wits that help to stock a 
country with proverbs." It is not often that an author 
ventures to praise his own speeches ; and that George 
Eliot did so shows how much Mrs. Poyser's special wit 
was one ingredient of her own intellectual tendency. 



v.] ADAM BEDE 79 

111 her later novels one sometimes regrets that Mrs. 
Poyser did not come to the fore to temper the graver 
moods. Mrs. Poyser may take rank with Sam Weller 
as one of the irresistible humorists. She has a special 
gift for attracting us by the most unscrupulous feats of 
sophistry. Poor Molly breaks a jug, and has been just 
driven to tears by Mrs. Poyser's eloquence for her 
unparalleled clumsiness, when Mrs. Poyser repeats the 
feat, to the amusement of her husband. '■' It 's all very 
fine to look on and grin," she retorts ; " but there 's 
times when the crockery seems alive, an' flies out o' 
your hand like a bird. . . . What is to be broke loill be 
broke, for I never dropped a thing i' my life for want 
o' holding it, else I should never ha' kept the crockery 
all these 'ears as I bought at my own wedding." She 
quenches an outburst of laughter soon after by sum- 
moning up a sudden vision of her being laid up in 
bed, and the children dying, and the murrain coming 
among the cattle, and everything going to rack and 
ruin — a prophetic picture which, though logically irre- 
levant, is most effective rhetorically. Another brilliant 
specimen of the same figure of speech occurs when 
she is roused to speak her mind to the squire, who has 
hinted at giving the farm to a new tenant. "It's a 
pity," she says, " but what Mr. Thurle should take it, 
and see if he likes to live in a house wi' all the 
plagues o' Egypt in 't — wi' the cellar full o' water, and 
frogs and toads hoppin' up the steps by dozens — and 
the floors rotten, and the rats and mice gnawing every 
bit o' cheese, and runnin' over our heads as we lie i' 
bed till we expect 'em to eat us up alive — as it 's a mercy 
they hanna eat the children long ago." It is super- 
fluous to quote fragments of Mrs. Poyser's familiar 



80 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

eloquence — spoilt by necessary curtailment — except to 
suggest the problem, Why is she so charming? The 
answer is, I suppose, in a general way to be found in 
the delicious contrast between Mrs. Poyser's intense 
shrewdness and strong affections, with the quick 
temper and the vivacity with which she snatches at 
the most preposterous flights of fancy which will be- 
wilder and discomfit her antagonists for the moment. 
A logician might amuse himself by analysing her 
ingenious arguments. Meanwhile her love for her 
husband and the irrepressible Totty — one of the por- 
traits which, without being sentimental, shows George 
Eliot's most feminine appreciation of the charms of 
childhood — and even her kindness to Hetty, though 
she does see through that young woman's weaknesses, 
entitles her to the regard felt for her by all readers. 
That regard, indeed, is so well established that I am 
only using fragments to recall, not to justify the 
universal sentiment. I will only note in passing 
that a full criticism of Ada7n Bede would have to 
touch upon many other subordinate characters. Bar- 
tie Massey, for example, the schoolmaster, is, in his 
way, an admirable pendant to Mrs. Poyser. Adam 
Bede's mother is equally life-like, and the passage in 
which she speaks of her wedding was judiciously 
noticed by Charles Reade as a masterly touch of 
human nature. Seth Bede, I confess, bores me. 

If I cannot say, therefore, that Adam Bede impresses 
me as the author intended it to impress her readers, I 
think that by a kind of felicitous accident it came to 
be a masterpiece in a rather different sense. The 
memory of Mrs. Samuel Evans brought up a vivid 
picture of the little world in which she moved ; though 



v.] ADAJI BEDE 81 

lier world, as represented by Adam Bede and Mrs. 
Poyser themselves, looked npon Methodism as rather 
an intrnding and questionable force than as the spiritual 
leaven which was to redeem it. George Eliot, mean- 
ing to set forth the beauty of Dinah Morris's character, 
incidentally comes to draw a more attractive picture 
of the sinners whom she ought to have awakened. 
Dinah gives up preaching when the Society decides 
against the practice, whereas her prototype, it is said, 
joined another sect rather than be silenced. Dinah 
settles down by her domestic hearth, and Adam re- 
mains a sound Churchman. He admits in his old age, 
we are told, that the excellent vicar, Mr. Irwine, 
"didn't go into deep speritial experience," and only 
preached short moral sermons. Apparently Adam 
thought none the worse of him. He quotes Mrs. 
Poyser's dictum that Mr. "Irwine was like a good 
meal o' victual ; you were the better for him without 
thinking on it ; and Mr. Ryde [his successor] was like 
a dose of physic ; he gripped you and worreted you, 
and after all he left you much the same." We get the 
impression that Mrs. Poyser and Adam took the most 
judicious view ; and that the rustic congregation, with 
its " ruddy faces and bright waistcoats," which reposed 
in the great square pews and listened to Mr. Irwine's 
moral without attaching any particular meaning to 
theological formulae, did very well without stronger 
spiritual stimulants. "The world," in Sir W. Besant's 
formula, "went very well then." Adam Bede, like 
Waveiiey, might have had for a second title 'Tis 
Sixty Years Since; and the verdict seems to be that 
the simple society of that period was sound at the 
core ; wholesome and kindly, if not very exciting. 



82 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

The pathos to be found in commonplace lives was the 
main topic of the Scenes of Clerical Life; and now, 
looking back with fondness to her early days, and 
through them to the early days of her parents, George 
Eliot finds a beauty not in the individuals alone, but 
in the whole quiet humdi-um order of existence of the 
rustic population. Everybody is treated with a kindly 
touch. Even the seducer, Arthur Donnithorne, instead 
of being the wicked baronet who generally appears on 
such occasions, is a thoroughly amiable, if rather weak, 
young man, who is not aware of the sufferings of his 
victim till too late, and then does all he can to obviate 
unpleasant consequences. "At present," she says, 
writing a little later, my " mind works with most free- 
dom and the keenest sense of poetry in my remotest 
past, and there are many strata to be worked through 
before I can begin to use, artistically, any material I 
may gather in the present." The world of Adam Bede 
clearly is the world of her first years, harmonised by 
loving memories and informed, no doubt, with more 
beauty than it actually possessed. Her philosophy, 
indeed, reminds her that the range of ideas of her 
characters was singularly narrow and hopelessly ob- 
solete. She has no sympathy with the romanticism 
which leads to reactionary fancies. She is perfectly 
well awai*e of the darker sides of the past, though she 
does not insist upon them. She has herself breathed 
a larger atmosphere. Only her affectionate recognition 
of the merits of the old world makes one feel how 
much conservatism really underlay her acceptance, in 
the purely intellectual sphere, of radical opinions. 

The Scenes of Clerical Life had made a more decided 
success with critics than with the public. Adam Bede 



v.] ADAM BEDE 83 

had an equal and triumphant success with both classes. 
The original agreement with Blackwood had been for 
£800 for four years' copyright. Seven editions and 
16,000 copies Avere printed during the first year (1859). 
Blackwood acknowledged the success generously by 
another check for £800, and gave back the copyright. 
He offered at the same time £2000 for 4000 copies of 
her next novel, and proposed to pay at the same rate 
for subsequent editions. The pecuniary success put 
her at once and permanently beyond the reach of 
any pecuniary pressure. Meanwhile she had received 
hearty greetings on all sides. In April she notes that 
she has left off recording the " pleasant letters and 
words" that had come to her: "the success has been 
so triumphantly beyond anything I had dreamed of, 
that it would be tiresome to put down particulars." 
" Shall I ever," she asks herself, " write another book 
as true as Adam Bede ? " The " weight of the future 
presses on me and makes itself felt even more than 
the deep satisfaction of the past and present." Old 
friends had been delighted. One of them, Mme. 
Bodichon, had discovered tlie authorship, though she 
had only inferred it from extracts in the reviews. 
Her friends the Brays were not so perspicacious, and 
were " overwhelmed with surprise " when in June she 
revealed the secret to them. She reopened her ac- 
quaintance with M. D'Albert by announcing to him 
that she had " turned out " to be, like him, " an 
artist," though in words, not with the pencil. Mr. 
Herbert Spencer wrote an " enthusiastic " letter, and 
declared that he felt the better for reading the book. 
Mrs. Carlyle felt herself in " charity with the whole 
human race " after the same experience, though her 



84 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

husband apparently could not be persuaded to try 
-whether his views of the race could be softened by 
the same application. Letters from Froude and John 
Brown of Rah and his Friends called forth grateful ac- 
knowledgments. Fellow-novelists were equally warm. 
Dickens made her personal acquaintance, and begged 
for a novel in Household Words. Charles Reade de- 
clared that "Adam Bede was the finest thing since 
Shakespeare." Mrs. Gaskell said how " earnestly, fully, 
and humbly '^ she admired both Adam Bede and its 
precursors. " I never read anything so complete and 
beavitiful in fiction in my life before." Bulwer, with 
less expansiveness, pronounced the book to be "worthy 
of great admiration," and congratulated Blackwood 
upon his discovery. He thought, it seems, from a 
later note, that the defects of the book were the use 
of dialect and the marriage of Adam Bede. " I would 
have my teeth drawn," says George Eliot, "rather 
than give up either." One comic incident occurred 
amidst this general chorus of praise. The originals of 
some of the descriptions in the novel had been guessed 
by people familiar with the neighbourhood ; and in 
searching for an author, they had guessed at a Mr. 
Liggins, who dwelt in that region. A Warwickshire 
friend, writing to the real author, asked her whether 
she had read the books written under the name of 
George Eliot, and told her the secret of the Liggins 
authorship. Mr. Liggins, he added, got no profit out 
of Adam Bede, and gave it freely to Blackwood. The 
incident was not unparalleled. A young lady, shortly 
after this time, made a false claim to one of Trollope's 
stories, then appearing anonymously in a magazine. 
The claim being taken seriously, she had not the 



v.] ADAM BEDE 85 

heart to disavow it; and lier father soon afterwards 
called upon the proprietor to inquire indignantly why 
his daughter had been allowed to write gratuitously. 
It does not appear whether Mr. Liggins accepted the 
authorship or only refrained from a direct disavowal. 
The claim seems to have caused rather more vexation 
than was necessary; but the main result was that the 
secret soon became known. It had been revealed to 
Blackwood in the previous year (Feb. 1858), soon after 
the publication of the Clerical Scenes. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE MILL ON THE FLOSS 

AdamBede had not been long in the hands of readers 
when a new novel was begun. At the end of April 
1859 George Eliot had finished a short story called 
"The Lifted Veil'' — taken up as "a resource when 
her head was too stupid for more important work " — 
and was about to " rewrite " the first two chapters of 
the novel which ultimately received the name of The 
Mill on the Floss. The first volume was finished before 
October, the second on 16th January, and the third 
on 21st March 1860. It appeared at the beginning of 
April, rivalled Adam Bede in its immediate popularity, 
and sustained or increased her reputation with the 
most thoughtful readers. In one respect, as already 
intimated, it is clearly the most interesting of all her 
books. In the Scenes of Clerical Life she had made 
use of the stories current in the early domestic circle ; 
in Adam Bede she had drawn a portrait of that circle 
itself ; and she now took herself for a heroine, and the 
first two volumes become virtually a spiritual autobiog- 
raphy. The title originally suggested, " Sister Maggie," 
is really the most appropriate. The external circum- 
stances have, of course, been altered. The scenery 
is supposed to be in Lincolnshire, and the town of 
St. Ogg's is said to represent Gainsborough. But her 



CHAP. VI.] THE MILL ON THE FLOSS 87 

native district still supplies the details. The '' round 
pool," to which she had gone on fishing expeditions 
with her brother, and the " Red Deeps,'' wdiich had 
been a favourite haunt, are transported from Griff to 
Dorlcote Mill. The attic to which Maggie retires in 
the mill is the attic to which George Eliot had retired 
in her father's house. Her brother, we are told, had 
already detected her in her first story. She was now 
revealed, not only to him, but to her old neighbours, 
by the closeness of her descriptions. The important 
point, however, is her identit}^ wath the heroine. The 
elder Tullivers do not represent her parents ; and the 
brother Tom, it is to be hoped, w^as at most vaguely 
suggested by the real Isaac Evans. But Maggie 
Tulliver, spite of certain modifications — the remark- 
able personal beauty, for example, which has for good 
reasons to be bestowed upon her — evidently repre- 
sents as clearly as possible what George Eliot would 
have been had she been transplanted in her infancy 
to some slightly different family in the same district. 
Although many of the best novels in the language 
are autobiographical, there is hardly one w^hich gives 
so vivid and direct a representation of the writer's 
most intimate characteristics. It is proper, I believe, 
to speak of such writing as "subjective" — an epithet 
Avhich sometimes suggests an erroneous inference. 
Every gemiine description is subjective in the sense 
that it must give the writer's own impressions, and is 
not a mere adoption of language which has recorded 
the impressions of others. But it need not be " sub- 
jective " in the sense of giving the individual peculi- 
arities alone. Self-knowledge implies also knowledge 
of our common human nature. The novelist speaks 



88 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

for us because he speaks for himself. The actual 
" confession," of course, depends for its interest upon 
the interest of the character revealed ; and if that 
character be one of great moral and intellectual power, 
and an impressive incarnation of an interesting type 
of the human species, the direct utterance of its emo- 
tions has a peculiar fascination. "To my feeling," 
said George Eliot, " there is more thought and a pro- 
founder veracity in The Mill than in Adam; but Adam 
is more complete and better balanced. My love of 
the childhood scenes made me linger over them, so 
that I could not develop as fully as I wished the con- 
cluding 'book,' in which the tragedy occurs, and 
which I had looked forward to with much attention 
and premeditation from the beginning." Bulwer had 
made this criticism, and had also found fault with the 
scene in which Maggie accej)ts Tom's dictation too 
passively. She admitted that he was right in both 
cases, and both remarks were, as we shall see, signifi- 
cant. The Mill on the Floss, indeed, considered simply 
as a story, obviously suffers from the disproportionate 
development of the earlier part ; but I do not think 
that any reader could wish for a change which would 
sacrifice the revelation of character to the requirements 
of the plot. Taken by itself, the first part of The Mill 
represents to my mind the culmination of George 
Eliot's power. Maggie is one example of the femi- 
nine type which occurs with important modifications 
in most of the other stories. But George Eliot throws 
herself so frankly into Maggie's position, gives her 
'' double " such reality by the wayward foibles associated 
with her nobler impulses, and dwells so lovingly upon 
all her joys and sorrows, that the character glows with 



VI.] THE MILL ON THE FLOSS 89 

a more tender and poetic charm than any of her other 
heroines. I suppose that Dinah Morris would be 
placed higher in the scale of morality ; but if the 
test of a heroine's merits be the reader's disposition 
to fall in love with her (and that, I confess, is my 
own), I hold that Maggie is worth a wilderness of 
Dinahs. 

One result of this sympathy Avith her heroine is 
conspicuous. No book, I imagine, ever set forth so 
clearly and touchingly the glamour with Avhich the 
childish imagination invests the trivial and common- 
place. There is enough poetry in all of us in our 
earlier years to enable us to appreciate the truth, 
though rare genius is required to recall so vividly 
the old associations and to bring out so tenderly 
their pathetic side. We all have enough poetry left 
beneath our layers of commonplace to share Maggie's 
emotions in the attic, with its high-pitched roof, its 
worm-eaten floors and shelves, and dark rafters fes- 
tooned with cobwebs, where she keeps her " Fetish " : 
the trunk of an old doll, into whose head she drives 
nails in emulation of Jael's feat as pictured in the 
Family Bible. We can understand, too, the "dim 
delicious awe " produced by the " resolute din, the un- 
resting motion of the great stones " in the mill, where 
the meal pours down till the very spider-nets look 
like a fairy bulwark. Maggie speculated especially 
upon the " fat floury spiders," and their probable rela- 
tions to spiders of the outside world. Toads and ear- 
wigs become actors in other little romances. She con- 
fides to her little cousin that Mrs. Earwig is running 
so fast to fetch a doctor for a small earwig that has 
fallen into the hot copper. Brother Tom shows his 



90 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

niatter-of-fact character by smashing the earwig " as 
a superfluous yet easy means of proving the entire 
unreality " of such a story. The imaginative faculty 
transfigures toads and earwigs and invests with mys- 
tery the round pool, framed with willows and tall 
reeds, where she delights in the " whispers and dreamy 
silences," and listens to the " light dipping sounds of 
the rising fish and the gentle rustling as if the willows 
and the reeds and the water lend their happy whisper- 
ing also." Her life is to change, but the old joy can 
never be quite lost. " Our delight in the sunshine on 
the deep-bladed grass to-day would be no more than 
the faint perception of wearied souls if it were not for 
the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which 
still live in us and transform our perception into love." 
Meanwhile, however, imagination is a faculty which 
has its disadvantages when it is placed in uncongenial 
surroundings. Its possessor or victim has to suffer 
terrible raps over the knuckles from the Tom Tullivers. 
•' Those bitter sorrows of childhood ! " she exclaims, 
" when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has 
not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, 
and the space from summer to summer seems measure- 
less ! " George Eliot insists upon this text, and the 
absurdity of telling a child that its real troubles are 
to come. '^ We have sobbed piteously, standing with 
tiny bare legs above our little socks, when we have 
lost sight of a mother or nurse," but we can no longer 
revive the poignancy of the moment. " Surely if we 
could recall that early bitterness and the dim guesses, 
the strangely perspectiveless conception of life that 
gave the bitterness its intensity, we should not pooh 
pooh the griefs of our children." I would not ven- 



VI.] THE MILL OX THE FLOSS 91 

ture to pronounce upon the general soundness of the 
doctrine ; in that matter we all generalise from our 
private experience, and are very liable to illusions ; 
but the truth for a child of Maggie's peculiarities is 
undeniable and most pathetic. When she is not only 
snubbed by Tom, but roused to jealousy by his kind- 
ness to her cousin Lucy, " there were passions at war 
in her to have made a tragedy, if tragedies were made 
by passion only; but the essential tl ix.iyt6o<; who 
was present in the passion was wanting in the action ; 
the utmost Maggie could do, with a thrust of her 
small brown arm, was to push poor little pink-and- 
white Lucy into the cow-trodden mud." The remark 
indicates the curious power of the book. The chief 
actors are children, their surroundings are of the 
dullest and narrowest conceivable, and yet we are 
spectators of a drama with really tragic interest. " Not 
Leonore," we are told, " in that preternatural midnight 
excursion with her phantom lover, was more terrified 
than poor Maggie in her entirely natural ride on a 
short-paced donkey wath a gypsy behind her, who 
considered that he was earning half a crown." The 
bray of another donkey under the setting sun becomes 
portentous, and the low cottages which she passes 
suggest a probable habitation of witches. 

The Mill on the Floss, so far, is a singularly powerful 
presentation, by help of her personal memories, of the 
theme of Andersen's '' ugly duckling " ; the seed of 
genius cast upon barren ground and yet managing 
to find sufficient nurture from the most unpromis- 
ing materials. It is the more effective because the 
tragic side is not too prominent. There is none of 
the brutal tyranny which crushes some children in 



92 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

pathetic fiction. Maggie, on the whole, in spite of 
all her scrapes, has a good many happy hours, and is 
child enough to accept the unintentional stupidities of 
her family circle as part of the inevitable. She is not 
conscious of being a misunderstood genius ; she only 
suffers because she has vague aspirations and longings, 
but does not feel herself to be enslaved or bound to overt 
revolt. The circle, forming the prose element against 
which her poetic impulses are to struggle, is drawn 
with a force and humour which, but for the author's 
distinct disavowal, would convince us that it was a 
study from the life. Indeed, though we have to admit 
that there was no actual counter^^art of Mrs. Glegg 
or the Pullets, we must suppose that some of their 
characteristic traits were taken from real people, 
though more or less modified and put into different 
combinations. Certainly we seem to be reading a 
direct transcript from early recollections when we 
pay a visit to the Pullets with Mrs. Tulliver and her 
children, when Mrs. Pullet devoutly exhibits her new 
bonnet, and is moved by the solemnity of the occasion 
to thoughts of human mortality. "Ah," she said at 
last, " I may never wear it twice, sister, who knows ? " 
"Don't talk o' that, sister," answered Mrs. Tulliver; 
" I hope you'll have your health this summer." " Ah, 
but there may come a death in the family, as there 
did soon after I had my green satin bonnet. Cousin 
Abbott may go, and we can't think o' wearing crape 
less nor half a year for him." " That tvoulcl be un- 
lucky," said Mrs. Tulliver, entering thoroughly into 
the possibility of an inopportune decease. The gloom 
becomes overpowering; and INIrs. Pullet, "beginning 
to cry," closes the scene worthily by saying, " Sister, if 



VI.] THE MILL OX THE FLOSS 93 

you should never see that bonnet again till I 'm dead 
and gone, you '11 remember I showed it you this day." 
And so they descend to the amiable Mr. Pullet, who 
solaces his mind when at a loss for conversation with 
lozenges and peppermint-drops, and is the proud 
possessor of a musical-box. His profound respect 
for his wife is shown by his memory of the right 
time for taking her doctor's stuff. " There 's the pills 
as before every other night, and the new drops at 
eleven and four, and the ' fervescing mixture ' when 
agreeable," rehearsed Mr. Pullet, with a punctuation 
determined by a lozenge on his tongue. "Doctor 
Turnbull," he adds, " has n't got such another patient 
as you in this parish, now old Mrs. Sutton 's gone." 
'' Pullet," says his wife, touched by this delicate com- 
pliment, "keeps all my physic bottles — did you know, 
Bessy ? He won't have one sold. He says it 's nothing 
but right folks should see 'em when I 'm gone. They 
fill two o' the long storeroom shelves already — but," 
she added, beginning to cry a little, " it 's well if they 
ever fill three. I may go before I 've made up the 
dozen o' these last sizes." The conversation runs on 
with such admirable naturalness, that we can but take 
it as the echo of such talks as w^ere once the staple of 
conversation at CJhilvers-Coton. We may look out 
upon old farms as we are hurried past them in the 
railway and wonder whether they still shelter Tullivers 
and Dodsons, and possibly ask the more inscrutable 
question, whether the talk of some ladies nearer 
home may not in its essence resemble the remarks 
of Mrs. Pullet. 

The precious books were meant as revelations of 
the romance to be found under the most commonplace 



94 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

exteriors. It becomes a problem whether this bit of 
commonplace is not too sordid. It is "irradiated 
by no sublime principles, no romantic visions, no active 
self-renouncing faith, moved by none of those wild, 
uncontrollable passions which create the dark shadows 
of misery and crime — without that primitive rough 
simplicity of events, that hard submissive ill-paid toil, 
that childlike spelling out of what nature has written 
which gives its poetry to peasant life." George Eliot 
admits that she shares the sense of oppressive narrow- 
ness, but wishes to show how it acted upon the young 
souls immersed in it. And, after all, she holds that 
it had its good results. Its religion was simply blind 
acceptance of tradition, and its morality adherence to 
established customs. The religion meant going to 
church on proper occasions ; being baptized, because 
otherwise one could not be buried ; and taking care 
that there should be the *' proper pall-bearers and well- 
cured hams at one's funeral." Mr. Tulliver took much 
the same view of the services as Tennyson's immortal 
farmer from the same region. He considered, how- 
ever, that " church was one thing and common-sense 
another, and he wanted nobody to tell him what 
common-sense was." He shows a touch worthy of 
the " Northern Farmer " when he orders his son to 
record in the Family Bible a declaration that he will 
not forgive his enemy, and hopes that evil may befall 
him. There is a strain of the old Viking blood in him 
after all, and it is more or less shown in the morality. 
The Dodsons were " a very proud race " ; no one should 
be able to tax them with a breach of traditional duty. 
So, even when Mrs. Glegg, the most nagging and con- 
tradictory of them all, quarrels with her sister, she 



VI.] THE MILL OX THE FLOSS 95 

feels bound to leave their fair share of her property 
to her sister's children. Their pride was whole- 
some, as it identified honour with "perfect integrity, 
thoroughness of work, and faithfulness to admitted 
rules." Mr. Glegg, like his neighbours, was "near"; 
he had made money very slowly, by steady parsimony, 
and saving had become an end in itself. He would 
have thought it a " mad kind of lavishness " to give 
away a five-pound note to save a poor widow's 
furniture, but he was really sorry for her ; and was 
as anxious to save other people's money as his own. 
The Tullivers had warmer hearts and more impulsive 
characters than their neighbours, and discharge their 
family duties from genuine affection as well as from 
a sense of traditional affection. Mr. Tulliver's kind- 
ness to his ruined sister atones for his recklessness 
and his perverse passion for " lawing " ; and his love for 
his "'little wench" gives her main consolation under 
the troubles of her childhood. Her sympathy for him 
under his troubles and illness is a natural stage in the 
development of her finer qualities. 

So far, if it be true that George Eliot's fondness for 
the old memories had betrayed her into some dis- 
proportionate length, no one can deny the extraor- 
dinary skill and force with which the situation is 
prepared. We may miss at times the more idyllic 
elements represented by Mrs. Poyser's circle, though 
the charming pedlar Bob Jakin brings some of the old 
wit and. quaint humour into the less exhilarating sur- 
roundings. At any rate, the mine is very effectually 
laid, and we now have to watch the explosion. Maggie, 
with her pathetic attempts to snatch at any floating 
bits of learning that may enable her intellectual wings 



96 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

to expand, lias gone through her creator's experience 
in a rather more trying form. She has had to feed 
upon Defoe's History of the Devil, and made attempts 
to draw honey from the Latin Grammar, Enclid, and 
Aldrich ; and now that a happy chance has introduced 
her to a Kempis, we can see that she is fitted to 
receive consolation, under the dry and barren outward 
life, in some form of religious mysticism. When the 
sensitive and artistic Philip Wakem, made eager for 
consolation by his deformity and his own domestic 
difficulties, meets the beautiful young woman, we are 
also not surprised that her longings for sympathy should 
turn to fl human object. On both sides there is ample 
opportunity for awaking love and pity. It is natural, 
again, that the position should bring her into collision 
with her brother. He has no turn for poetry and art 
and mysticism, but his plunge into difficulties has called 
out the sturdy qualities of the Tulliver race, and we 
sympathise with his energy in retrieving the family 
fortunes. The quarrel arises inevitably when he finds 
that his sister is in love with a youth, not only deficient 
in the manly qualities, but son and heir to the enemy 
against whom he has inscribed a vow of vengeance. 
That he should take a decided course of action under 
the circumstances is only to be expected. ISTor, 
perhaps, is it surprising that he behaves like a brute. 
There is plenty of " heredity " to account for that. 
But here is a first difficulty. George Eliot admitted, 
as I have said, that the scene between brother and 
sister was not quite satisfactory. The young woman, 
with her high-wrought enthusiasm, submits too " pas- 
sively," not to say, tamely, to his imperious inter- 
ference. She confesses that she has done wrong, and 



VI.] THE MILL ON THE FLOSS 97 

promises not to see her lover again in private. Tom's 
behaviour, I fancy, makes him simply offensive to 
most people, though it seems to be obvious that we 
are intended to retain a certain regard for him. The 
failure seems to me to be easily explicable. I heard 
once from a most intelligent lady of an elder genera- 
tion that the agitation for women's rights was absurd, 
because as a matter of fact all women like, and always 
will like, to be slaves. Younger ladies, it is true, have 
assured me that this is a complete mistake, and that 
women have as strong an objection as men to be 
objects of tyranny. I should be afraid to express any 
opinion upoir a question in which women must be the 
best judges. Yet I am half inclined to guess that, 
along with other conservative tendencies, George Eliot 
had inherited some sympathy with this older view. 
Of course, she would be the last person to approve the 
tyranny of brothers or husbands, and is only trying 
to do justice to the moral code accepted in St. Ogg's 
circles, of which it was a part that the family should 
be under masculine supremacy. The true difficulty is 
again, as I take it, that she was too thoroughly 
feminine to be quite at home in the psychology of the 
male animal. Her women are — so far as a man can 
judge — unerringly drawn. We are convinced at 
every point of the insight and fidelity of the analysis ; 
but when she draws a man, she has not the same 
certainty of touch. She is, I have suggested, a little 
too contemptuous when the Samson yields to the De- 
lilah; and when he asserts his privileges, his strength 
is apt to be too like brutality. Many rustic Tom 
Tullivers would, no doubt, ride roughshod over sisterly 
sensibilities ; but if we are to retain sympathy for 



98 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

their better nature, they shoukl show more twinges 
of conscience. Tom's profound conviction that what- 
ever he does is therefore right, is no doubt character- 
istic ; but he miglit at least feel that he is doing a 
painful duty, and not be represented as utterly in- 
sensible to the claims of the old childish affections. 

The comparative weakness, however, of masculine 
portraits has a more unpleasant result. She admits that 
the tragedy which follows is "not adequately prepared." 
She will " always regret " the want of fulness in the 
treatment of the third volume, due, as she says, to the 
episclie Breite into which she was beguiled by love of 
her subject in its predecessors. But she defends the 
position itself, which many readers have condemned. 
"Maggie's position towards Stephen Guest — upon 
which the tragedy turns — is," she says, " too vital a 
part of my whole conception and purpose for me to be 
converted to the condemnation of it. If I am wrong 
there — if I did not really know what my heroine 
would feel and do under the circumstances in which I 
deliberately placed her — I ought not to have written 
this book at all, but quite a different work, if any. If 
the ethics of art do not admit the truthful presenta- 
tion of a character essentially noble, but liable to great 
error — error that is anguish to its own nobleness — 
then it seems to me the ethics of art are too narrow, 
and must be widened to correspond with a widening 
psychology." Without discussing the " ethics of art," 
we may, I should think, fully agree that the critical 
canon thus abjured is erroneous. I am not aware, 
however, that any professor of aesthetics has laid 
down the rule that it is wrong to represent a noble 
character led into fatal error, and consequent remorse. 



VI.] THE MILL ON THE FLOSS 99 

by its weaknesses. I should have supposed that 
nothing could be a more legitimate topic. George 
Eliot is unintentionally changing the issue upon which 
a defence is really required. We have sympathised 
keenly with Maggie. We understand the " strange 
thrill of awe " which passes through her when passages 
from the Imitation of Christ affect her like a strain of 
solemn music ; when she infers that " the miseries of 
her young life had come from fixing her heart on her 
own pleasure"; and saw the possibility of looking at 
her own life as " an insignificant part of a divinely 
guided whole." She forms "plans of self-humiliation 
and entire devotedness, and fancies that renunciation 
will give her " the satisfaction for which she had so long 
been "craving in vain." "She had not perceived — 
how could she until she had lived longer ? — the inmost 
truth of the old monk's outpourings that renuncia- 
tion remains sorrow, though sorroAV willingly borne. 
Maggie was still panting for happiness, and was in 
ecstasy because she had found the key to it." That is 
beautifully said, and is followed by an admirable ac- 
count of her effort to attain the true spirit. When, 
again, Philip Wakem urges her not to stifle human 
affections, and persist in a " narrow asceticism," and 
assures her that " poetry and art and knowledge are 
sacred and pure," we can quite seethe force of the argu- 
ment, and understand why it should be the prologue to 
a love-scene a little later. After an appeal from Philip, 
Maggie at last " smiled with glistening tears, and 
then stooped her tall head to kiss the pale face that 
was full of pleading, timid love like a woman's. She 
had a moment of real happiness then — a moment of 
belief that, if there were sacrifice in this love, it was 



L.oFC. 



100 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

all the richer and more satisfying." The " renuncia- 
tion " and the desire for happiness may be reconciled. 
With Tom Tulliver in the background, we have 
now abundant material for tragedy. But, at the 
opening of the third volume, we are abruptly intro- 
duced to a new character. Maggie has become a young 
lady, visiting her cousin. The ''fine young man," 
snapping a pair of scissors in the face of the " King 
Charles " spaniel on Miss Lucy Deane's feet, " is no 
other than Mr. Stephen Guest, whose diamond ring, 
attar of roses, and air of nonchalant leisure at twelve 
o'clock in the day are the graceful and odoriferous 
result of the largest oil-mill and the most extensive 
wharf in St. Ogg's." In other words, Mr. Guest is a 
typical provincial coxcomb, with a certain taste for 
music, fitted no doubt to excite the admiration of young 
ladies at St. Ogg's. No attempt is made to suggest 
that he is anything but a self-satisfied commonplace 
young gentleman, who has condescended to accept the 
hand of Miss Deane. There is no difficulty in under- 
standing him and his manners. When he dances 
with Maggie at a ball soon afterwards, and takes her 
into a conservatory, she looks very lovely as she 
stretches her arm to a rose. " Who has not felt the 
beauty of a woman's arm? — the unspeakable sugges- 
tions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and 
all the varied gently lessening curves, down to the 
delicate wrist with its tiniest almost imperceptible 
nicks in the firm softness ? A woman's arm touched 
the soul of a great sculptor two thousand years ago, so 
that he wrought an image of it for the Parthenon which 
moves us still as it clasps lovingly the time-worn marble 
of a headless trunk. Maggie's was such an arm as that. 



VI.] THE MILL ON THE FLOSS 101 

and it had the warm tints of life. A mad impulse 
seized on Stephen ; he darted towards the arm and 
showered kisses on it, clasping the wrist." It is 
curious that a little later (1864) George Eliot de- 
scribes a " divine picture " by Sir F. Burton, in which 
a mailed knight is kissing the arm of a woman "by an 
uncontrollable movement." The subject, she says, is 
from a " Norse Legend." It '' might have been made 
the most vulgar thing in the world — the artist has 
raised it to the highest pitch of refined emotion. The 
kiss is on the fur-lined sleeve that covers the arm, and 
the face of the knight is the face of a man to whom the 
kiss is a sacrament." Mr. Stephen Guest's performance 
does not strike one in the sacramental light. Maggie 
is properly angry and astonished at the time, but 
she soon becomes more amenable ; and though she has 
scruples, and goes through a " fierce battle of emotions," 
she presently finds herself drifting to sea with him in a 
boat, and is only arrested by her conscience at the last 
moment when she is some way towards Gretna Green. 
Renunciation gets the better of the longing for happi- 
ness. " We can only choose," she says, " whether we will 
indulge ourselves in the present moment, or whether 
we will renounce that for the sake of obeying the 
divine voice within us, for the sake of being true to 
all the motives that sanctify our lives." To let this 
belief go would be to lose the only light in the dark- 
ness of life. She returns ; but the knot is insoluble, 
and has to be finally cut by the waves of the Floss. 
George Eliot herself, admitting the need for more 
development, maintained, as we have seen, that the con- 
clusion was right, and it has been defended upon the 
same ground. It is right, because the " psychology " 



102 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

is right. Given the character and the circumstances, 
that is, this was the inevitable ontcome. It is, no 
doubt, painful and disagreeable that a young woman 
of so many noble qualities should be guilty of such a 
step ; but noble young women do make slips — that, I 
fear, is undeniable — and Maggie behaves as might be 
expected from her previous history. That is where I 
presume to doubt. Nobody, indeed, can deny that 
the passion of love is apt to generate illusions. Most 
men would probably be able to give examples from 
their own experience of the truth that young women 
who fall in love with somebody else have a singular 
inability for forming a correct judgment of the truly 
valuable qualities of masculine character. The fact 
has often been noticed, and is frequently turned to 
account by novelists. I will not deny that even 
Maggie's love for Stephen is conceivable. A young 
woman brought up in Dorlcote Mill was no doubt 
liable to be imposed upon by a false appearance of 
gentlemanlike character. But, one thing seems to be 
obvious. The whole theme of the book is surely the 
contrast between the " beautiful soul " and the com- 
monplace surroundings. It is the awakening of the 
spiritual and imaginative nature and the need of 
finding some room for the play of the higher faculties, 
whether in the direction of religious mysticism or of 
human affection. That such a character, with little 
experience of life and with narrow education, should 
fall into error is natural, if not inevitable. But then 
the error should surely correspond to some impulse 
which we can feel to be noble. Maggie may be 
wrong in attributing high qualities to her hero; but 
we should feel that, in her eyes, he has high qualities, 



VI.] THE MILL ON THE FLOSS 103 

and that the passion, if misdirected, is itself congenial 
to her better impulses. Miss Bronte's heroines fall in 
love with men whom the reader may dislike ; but it is 
because they take the men to be embodiments of great 
masculine qualities — energy, honour, and real gener- 
osity — under rather crusty outsides. Therefore, though 
we may doubt the perspicacity of the hero-worship, we 
do not feel that the sentiment is in itself degrading. 
But there is this difficulty with poor Maggie. Her 
admiration for Mr. Guest would be natural enough in 
the average miller's daughter suddenly brought into 
a rather superior social scale and introduced to a well- 
dressed young man scented with "attar of roses." 
But as Maggie, by her very definition, as one may say, 
is a highly exceptional young woman, she should surely 
have something exceptional in her love. We can 
understand her sympathy with Philip Wakem, who is 
a man of heart, and whose physical infirmity is an 
appeal for pity; we could have understood it if she 
had fallen in love with the excellent vicar of St. Ogg's, 
who would have been able to talk about a Kempis and 
religious sentimentalism ; and we might even have 
forgiven her if, after being a little overpowered by the 
dandified Stephen, she had shown some power of per- 
ceiving what a very poor animal he was. The affair 
jars upon us, because it is not a development of her 
previous aspirations, but suddenly throws a fresh and 
unpleasant light upon her character. ISTo one will 
say that the catastrophe is impossible ; he, at least, 
who would pronounce dogmatically upon such matters 
must be a bolder man than I am ; but neither, I think, 
can any one say that it was inevitable, or could have 
been expected, given the circumstances and the 



104 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. vi. 

characters. The truth is, I think, different. George 
Eliot did not herself understand what a mere hair- 
dresser's block she was describing in Mr. Stephen 
Guest. He is another instance of her incapacity for « 
portraying the opposite sex. No man could have 
introduced such a character without perceiving what 
an impression must be made upon his readers. We 
cannot help regretting Maggie's fate ; she is touching 
and attractive to the last ; but I, at least, cannot help 
wishing that the third volume could have been sup- 
pressed. I am inclined to sympathise with the readers 
of Clarissa Haiioive when they entreated Richardson 
to save Lovelace's soul. Do, I mentally exclaim, save 
this charming Maggie from damning herself by this 
irrelevant and discordant degradation. 



CHAPTER VII 

• SILAS MAIiXER 

George Eliot had not yet exhausted the materials of 
her early recollections. In the autumn of 1860 she 
wrote a short story called Brother Jacob, of which, 
as of its predecessor, The Lifted Veil, nothing need be 
said. But in the November of that year she began 
Silas Marner, which was finished in February 1861, 
and appeared by itself in March. Blackwood, she says, 
does not surprise her by calling it " rather sombre." 
She would not have expected it to interest any one 
except herself ('' since Wordsworth is dead ") had not 
Lewes been " strongly arrested " by it. The reference 
to Wordsworth is explained by her statement that it 
is meant to " set in a strong light the remedial influ- 
ences of pure natural human relations." She felt as 
if it would have been more suitable to metre than to 
prose, except that there would have been less room for 
the humorous passages. It was suggested, it seems, 
by a childish recollection of a " linen-weaver with a 
bag on his back." The recollection, it must be ad- 
mitted, can have counted for very little in the develop- 
ment of a story which is often considered to be her 
most perfect artistic performance. A curious literary 
coincidence — it can have been nothing more — is 
mentioned by Mathilde Blind. The Polish novelist, 

105 



106 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

Kraszewski, wrote a novel called Jermola, the Potter, 
said to be his masterpiece, and to have been translated 
into French, Dutch, and German. Jermola is an old 
servant who has retired to a deserted house in a 
remote village. He becomes almost apathetic in his 
solitude, till one day he finds a deserted infant under 
an oak. He devotes himself to the care of the child, 
and is helped in the unfamiliar process of nursing by a 
kind old woman. His energies revive, he takes up the 
trade of a potter to make a living for his new charge, 
succeeds in the business, and is brought into friendly 
relations wdth his neighbours. Finally, the child's 
parents turn up and reclaim their son. Jermola has 
to submit, but afterwards runs off with the boy into 
the forests. There the child dies of hardship, and 
Jermola ends his days as a melancholy hermit. The 
treatment, says Miss Blind, is entirely different from 
that of Silas Marner, but the leading motive is identical, 
and some of the details have, as will be seen, a curiously 
close resemblance. As there is clearly no question of 
copying, we must infer that both writers have worked 
out the logical consequences of similar situations ; 
Kraszewski's version is more " sombre," though either 
his catastrophe or that of George Eliot is equally 
conceivable. The supposed event — the moral recovery 
of a nature reduced by injustice and isolation to the 
borders of sanity — strikes one perhaps as more pretty 
than probable. At least, if one had to dispose of a 
deserted child, the experiment of dropping it by the 
cottage of a solitary in the hope that he would bring it 
up to its advantage and to his own regeneration would 
hardly be tried by a judicious philanthropist. That, 
perhaps, is the reason which made George Eliot think 



VII.] SILAS MAR NEB 107 

it more appropriate for poetry. In an idyll in verse 
one is less disposed to insist ujjon prosaic probabilities, 
or apply the rules of life suggested by the experience 
of the Charity Organisation Society. In SUas Marner 
George Eliot is a little tempted to fall into the error 
of the amiable novelists who are given to playing 
the part of Providence to their characters. It is true 
that the story begins by a painful case of apparent 
injustice. Silas Marner's life has been embittered by 
the casting of lots, which, on the principles of his sect, 
proves him to be guilty of the crime really committed 
by his accuser. But in the conclusion Providence 
seems to be making up for this little slip. The child 
is given to the weaver to recompense him for his 
sufferings, and, conversely, the real father is punished 
for neglecting his duty by the childlessness of his 
second marriage and the refusal of his daughter to 
accept him in place of her adopted parent. The 
excellent Dolly Winthrop sees a difficulty. She holds 
that the parson could probably explain the mistake 
about the casting of lots, though even he would have 
to tell it in " big words." But she is convinced that 
" Them above has got a deal tenderer heart than what 
I have." "There is plenty of trouble in the world, 
and things as we can never make out the rights on. 
And all as we've got to do is to trusten. Master 
Marner — to do the right thing as far as we know, and 
to trusten." If Marner had acted on that principle, he 
would n't have " run away from his fellow-creatures 
and been so lone." I will not quarrel with Mrs. 
Winthrop's solution of the ancient problem, nor with 
the moral which she deduces; and if the conclusion 
of the story seems to imply that compensation for 



108 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

injustice may be expected in this life rather more con- 
fidently than experience proves, another moral is also 
suggested. Mr. Godfrey Cass is driven to prevarica- 
tion and lying in order to conceal from his father that 
he has made a disreputable marriage, and to prevent 
his scamp of a brother from ousting him by revealing 
the result. His meanness answers admirably. The 
brother tumbles into a gravel-pit and is drowned, and 
the wife takes an overdose of laudanum at the right 
moment. He is freed from all fear of exposure, 
marries the right young woman, and has, on the 
whole, a successful life. This may console people who 
think that the justice of Providence- is called into play 
too clearly. But in truth the whole story is conceived 
in a way which makes a pleasant conclusion natural 
and harmonious. It is saved from excess of senti- 
mentalism by those admirable passages of humour, 
which, as we have seen, prevented the story from being 
put into verse. Silas Marner, as it turned out, was to 
be the last work in which George Eliot was to draw 
an idealised portrait of her earliest circle. It is full of 
admirable sketches from the squire to the poor weaver ; 
and the famous scene at the " Rainbow " is perhaps the 
best specimen of her humour. The condescending 
parish clerk and the judicious landlord and the con- 
tradictious farrier, with their discussions of village 
traditions, their attempts at humour, and the curious 
mental processes which take the place of reasoning, 
are delicious and inimitable. One secret is that we can 
sympathise with their humble attempts at intellectual 
intercourse. The brutality which too often underlies 
a good deal of more refined satire comes out in the 
" unflinching frankness," which at the " Rainbow " is 



VII.] SILAS MABNEB 109 

taken for the " most piquant form of joke." The pre- 
sumption of the assistant clerk, who hopes that he 
may have his own opinion of his vocal performances, is 
tempered by the remark that " there 'd be two opinions 
about a cracked bell if the bell could hear itself," and 
finally crushed by the critic who tells him that his 
voice is " well enough when he keeps it up in his nose." 
It 's your inside " as is n't right made for music ; it 's 
no better nor a hollow stalk." Much of the wit that 
passes current in more elegant circles differs from this, 
less in substance, than in the skill with which the 
sarcasm is ostensibly veiled. When Charles Lamb pro- 
posed to examine the bumps on the skull of an illiterate 
person, he was just as rude, though his rudeness is 
allowed to pass for harmless fun. The crude attempts 
of the natural man are redeemed from brutality by 
the absence of real ill-nature. So the argument as to 
reality of ghostly phenomena is a tacit parody upon a 
good deal of the controversy roused by " Psychical re- 
search." Some people, as the landlord urges, couldn't 
see ghosts, '' not if they stood as plain as a pikestaff 
before 'em." My wife, as he points out, "can't smell, 
not if she 'd the strongest of cheese under her nose. I 
never see a ghost myself; but then I says to myself, 
very like I haven't got the smell for 'em. I mean, 
putting a ghost for a smell, or else contrairiways. 
And so, I 'm for holding with both sides." The farrier 
retorts by asking, "What's the smell got to do with 
it ? Did ever a ghost give a man a black eye ? That 's 
what I should like to know. If ghos'es want me to 
believe in 'em, let 'em leave off skulking in the dark, 
and i' lone places — let 'em come in company and 
candles." " As if ghos'es 'ud want to be believed in 



no GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

by anybody so ignirant ! " replies the parish clerk. 
We have read something very like this, only expressed 
in the "big words" which Mrs. Winthrop left to the 
parson. One touch of blundering makes the whole 
world kin ; and in these good people, with their 
primitive views of logic and repartee and their quaint 
theology, we may, if we please, see a satire upon their 
betters. Rather, if we accept George Eliot's view, we 
have a kindly sympathy for the old order upon which 
she looked back so fondly. A modern " realist " 
would, I suppose, complain that she had omitted, or 
touched too slightly for his taste, a great many re- 
pulsive and brutal elements in the rustic world. The 
portraits, indeed, are so vivid as to convince us of 
their fidelity; but she has selected the less ugly, and 
taken the point of view from which we see mainly 
what was wholesome and kindly in the little village 
community. Silas Marner is a masterpiece in that 
way, and scarcely equalled in English literature, unless 
by Mr. Hardy's rustics in Far from the Madding Crowd 
and other early works. 

The novels hitherto noticed suggest an interesting 
comparison. M. Brunetiere in his study of the Roman 
Naturaliste infers from them that George Eliot is the 
type and the founder of English "naturalism." Eng- 
lish novelists are hardly to be classified in separate 
schools so distinctly as their French rivals ; and I 
fancy that M. Brunetiere slightly exaggerates the im- 
portance and extent of the new departure. Scott, for 
example, though called a " romantic," is as much a 
"naturalist" in his descriptions of Dandie Dinmont or 
Edie Ochiltree as George Eliot in her Adam Bede or 
Tulliver. But M. Brunetiere shows admirably the 



VII.] SILAS MABNEB 111 

peculiar merits of the " English natui-alism " which 
she represented. Her profound psychology, he says, 
her metaphysical solidity and her moral breadth, 
are displayed in that sympathetic treatment of the 
commonplace and ugly upon which I have had to 
insist. Sympathy of the heart and the intelligence is 
''the soul" of this " naturalisme." It preserved her, 
as M. Brunetiere points out, not only from the coarse 
brutalities of M. Zola, but from the scorn for the 
bourgeois in which he finds the weak side of Flaubert's 
Madame Bovary. This is the great set-off against the 
superior skill in unity of composition and thorough 
finish of style which must be allowed to be a French 
characteristic. I will not try to expand a criticism 
which shows a true appreciation of George Eliot's most 
admirable quality. I will only add that in a compari- 
son of George Eliot with French writers much would 
have to be said of George Sand, whom she had read 
with such enthusiasm, and in whose stories of French 
country life we may find the nearest parallel to Silas 
Marner. But though the affinity between the two 
great feminine novelists is sufficient to explain George 
Eliot's appreciation of her rival's sentiment and passion, 
it does not seem to have suggested any appropriation 
of artistic methods. One palpable difference is that 
while George Sand poured forth novels with amazing 
spontaneity and felicity, each of George Eliot's novels 
was the product of a kind of spiritual agony. Some 
consequences, good or bad, of George Eliot's method 
will become conspicuous. 



CHAPTER Vlli 



MIDDLE LIFE 



The publication of Silas Marner marks an important 
change in the direction of George Eliot's work. The 
memories of early days are no longer to be the 
dominant factor in her imaginative world ; and hence- 
forth one charm disappears ; however completely, to 
the taste of some readers, it may be replaced by others. 
She has begun, as we have seen, to consider theories 
about the relations of ethics and sesthetics and psy- 
chology ; and hereafter the influence of her theory upon 
her writing will be more obvious. This brings one in 
sight of certain general canons of criticism, upon which 
I do not desire to touch any further than is necessary 
for an appreciation of George Eliot herself. Yet the 
moral and philosophical implications of her novels are 
so prominent that it is impossible to omit altogether one 
or two questions as to their propriety. Many critics 
seem to lose their temper at any suggestion that a poem 
or a novel can have any legitimate didactic purpose. 
Everybody must sympathise with their annoyance. 
It is undeniably vexatious to take up a novel and find 
that it is a pamphlet in disguise, and that the envelope 
of fiction merely coats the insipid pill of a moral 
platitude. We have all suffered from such well-meant 
impositions in our childhood ; " we," I mean, who 

112 



CHAP. VIII.] MIDDLE LIFE 11,3 

were born in the good old days when children read 
the Parent's Assistant and Hymns for Infant Minds. 
Somehow many of the old stories with a moral were 
very delightful. I am still grateful to the author 
of Sandford and Merlon, though I fear that I did not 
assimilate the ethical teaching of the excellent Mr. 
Barlow. The objection, however, expresses a most 
undeniable and indeed painfully obvious proposition. 
There is, beyond all dispute, a fundamental distinction 
between the literature of the imagination and the 
literature of science. " We need not say," observes 
the historian of King Valoroso, " that blank verse is not 
argument." A novelist's facts can prove nothing, for 
the simple reason that they are fictions ; and his narra- 
tive, when it is reasoning in disguise, becomes intoler- 
able. But still we must ask. What is a poor novelist to 
do who happens to have been impressed by some of the 
great masters of thought, such as Plato or Spinoza, 
whose philosophies are embodied poetry ? Is he to 
forget all the thoughts that have occurred to him in 
his philosophical capacity, and to write as though he 
had no more speculations about the world or human 
nature than the most frivolous of his readers ? 
If his " philosophy " has really modified his own 
microcosm, can he drop it when he describes the 
world ? And why should he be called upon to 
drop it ? Must he not, at any rate, have some tinge 
of psychology ? When Fielding wrote Tom Jones, 
the first great English novel upon modern lines, he 
announced that he took " human nature " for his 
subject ; and all his successors have aimed, according 
to their capacity, at providing us with studies of the 
same subject from different points of view. We might 



114 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

describe this by saying tliat fiction must be applied 
psychology. The phrase, no doubt, would startle 
innocent readers who fear the intrusion of some 
hideous scientific doctrine. Yet it is a way of stating 
a harmless commonplace. Shakespeare was, no doubt, 
a very different writer from Professor Bain. He did 
not write a treatise upon the Emotions and the Will; 
but when he described Hamlet, he imagined a character 
which forcibly illustrates the relation between those 
faculties. The merit of the character depends upon 
the insight, and therefore upon the correctness of the 
psychology, though Shakespeare had not read Bain, 
nor even Bacon, and had never thought of the possi- 
bility of any such science, or of taking a scientific view 
at all. To George Eliot, of course, various psycho- 
logical theories, Mr. Herbert Spencer's and others, 
were familiar. They were too familiar, we may fancy, 
when in defending Maggie TuUiver she appeals, as I 
have said, to the desirability of conforming to en- 
lightened expositions of modern psychology. That 
may suggest a possible danger — the danger of con- 
structing her characters out of abstract formulee 
instead of reversing the process. But certainly it was 
not any abstract theory that taught her that a girl of 
Maggie's character would be likely to comfort herself 
with the mysticism of a Kempis, or to fall in love with 
Stephen Guest. She simply knew the fact from her 
own experience or her observation of others. But not 
the less, we may say without offence that her insight 
is justified by psychology, and that Maggie, like 
Hamlet, is profoundly interesting — not because her 
character has been constructed from psychological 
formulae, but because when presented it offers prob- 



VIII.] MIDDLE LIFE 115 

lems to the psychologist as fascinating as any direct 
autobiography. The truthfulness goes far beyond 
any explanation from our crude guesses at the appro- 
priate scientitic formulae. The imaginative intuition 
presents the concrete reality which no theorist can 
analyse into its constituent elements, and we can 
recognise, though we cannot logically prove, its fidelity 
and subtlety. Nor need we really be frightened by 
the*" philosophy." There is a rather quaint entry in 
her diary about this time :' " Walked with George over 
Primrose Hill. We talked of Plato and Aristotle." 
We may dread a possible intrusion of disquisitions 
upon the theories of those sages into the uncongenial 
sphere of fiction as well as into familiar talk. But, 
so far as we have yet gone, I cannot perceive any 
ground for offence of that kind. George Eliot was a 
" philosopher " in the sense that she had reflected long 
and seriously with all her very remarkable intellectual 
power upon some of the greatest problems which can 
occupy the mind. She had, in particular, thought of 
the part which is played by the religious beliefs and 
their real meaning and value. She had accepted, more 
or less, a particular system, though hitherto at least 
she made no special reference to it, and certainly did 
not change her novels into propagandist manifestoes. 
What, in fact, she had acquired was a cordial respect 
and sympathy for creeds embodied even in crude and 
superstitious dogmas; and she had, therefore, described 
many types, which in less thoughtful minds suggested 
only absurdities and provoked caricatures, with the 
intention of laying stress upon the nobler aspirations 
of such humble people as Silas Marner and Dolly 
Winthrop. If by " philosophy " we understand some 



116 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

metaphysical system constructed by logical subtlety, 
it has certainly no direct relation to poetry ; but if it 
corresponds to that state of mind in which the varying 
beliefs and instincts, even of the vulgar, have been 
considered with a desire to understand and appreciate 
their value, then it is likely, I fancy, to give harmony 
and sympathetic warmth to pictures of human life. 
George Eliot's merit in these novels is just proportioned 
to our sense that we are looking through the eyes of 
a tender, tolerant, and syiiipathetic observer of the 
aspirations of muddled and limited intellects. 

This suggests one other stumblingblock. George 
Eliot speaks, we have seen, of the *' ethics of art," and 
to some people this appears to imply a contradiction 
in terms. .Esthetic and ethical excellence, it seems, 
have nothing to do with each other. George Eliot 
repudiated that doctrine indignantly, and I confess 
that I could never quite understand its meaning. The 
" ethical " value of artistic work, she held, is simply 
its power of arousing sympathy for noble qualities. 
The "artist," if we must talk about that personage, 
must, of course, give true portraits of human nature 
and of the general relations of man to the universe. 
But the artist must also have a sense of beauty ; and, 
among other things, of the beauty of character. He 
must recognise the charm of a loving nature, of a 
spirit of self-sacrifice, or of the chivalrous and manly 
virtues. He shares, indeed, with the scientific 
observer the obligation of seeing things as they are ; 
and must not only admit the prevalence of evil, but 
see even what " soul of goodness " is to be found in 
things evil. He must be as absolutely impartial as 
the physiologist describing the physical organisation. 



VIII.] MIDDLE LIFE 117 

But the impartiality does not imply insensibility. 
The fairest statement of the facts ought, if our 
morality be sound, to bring out the beauty of the moral 
character most fully. In fact, the charm of all the 
great novelists, from Cervantes downwards, consists 
essentially in the power with which they have drawn 
attractive heroes, and won love both for them and 
their creators. If anybody holds that morality is a 
matter of fancy, and that the ideal of the sensualist 
is as good as that of the saint, he may logically con- 
clude that the morality of the novelist is really a 
matter of indifference. I hold myself that there is 
some real difference between virtue and vice, and 
that the novelist will show consciousness of the fact 
in proportion to the power of his mind and the range 
of his sympathies. Whether, as a matter of fact, 
novels do exert much ethical influence is another 
question ; and the answer depends a good deal upon 
the character of the readers. But I cannot doubt 
that one secret of George Eliot's power lay in a 
sympathy with many types in which was essentially 
implied a power of responding spontaneously to noble 
and tender sentiment, 

George Eliot's theory of the relation of novels to 
morality appears to me to be so far essentially sound. 
It must be admitted, however, that theories are danger- 
ous things. They become shackles or suggest erroneous 
applications of power. They are dangerous to the 
spontaneity which marks a true imaginative inspira- 
tion. The writer who wishes to enforce some moral 
maxim is apt not only to pervert facts, but to force 
his humour. He cudgels his brain into framing illus- 
trations which he takes for proofs. When this error 



118 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

is avoided, even the most direct didactic intention 
may cease to be mischievous. Richardson's novels, 
for example, were gigantic tracts, written deliberately 
and intentionally to enforce certain moral doctrines. 
That did not prevent Clarit^sa Ilarlotve from being one 
of the great novels of the world, nor was the Nouvelle 
Helo'ise of his disciple, Rousseau, less important on 
account of its didactic purpose. It does not matter 
so much why a writer should be profoundly interested 
in his work, nor to what use he may intend to apply 
it, as that, somehow or other, his interest should be 
aroused, and the world which he creates be a really 
living world for his imagination. This suggests the 
difficulty about George Eliot's later writings. The 
spontaneity of the early novels is beyond all doubt. 
She is really absorbed and fascinated by the memories 
tinged by the old affections. We feel them to be 
characteristic of a thoughtful mind, and so far to 
imply the mode of treatment which w^e call philoso- 
phical. Her theories, though they may have guided 
the execution, have not suggested the themes. A 
much more conscious intention w^as unfortunately to 
mark her later books, and the difficulties resulted of 
which I shall have to speak. 

The Leweses had lived at 8 Park Street, Richmond, 
from 1855 till the end of 1858. They then moved to 
Holly Lodge, where she formed an intimate friendship 
with the Congreves. Mr. Congreve was a leading 
member of the Positivist Society, which had much of 
her sympathy in the following years. In 1860, after 
the publication of the Mill on the Floss, they moved 
again to 16 Blandford Square. The union with Lewes 
had involved a breach wdth many of her early friends, 



VIII.] MIDDLE LIFE 119 

and in some cases the separation was obviously 
painful. She declares that it was never a trial to her 
to have been cut off from what is called the '' world," 
and thinks that she "never loved her fellow-creatures 
the less for it." Still she has a "peculiar regard" for 
those who stood by her at the time. " The list of 
those who did so," she adds, " is a short one, so that I 
can often and easily recall it." She explains a few 
days afterwards that she has made it a rule never to 
pay visits. " Without a carriage, and with my easily 
perturbed health, London distances would make any 
other rule quite irreconcilable for me with any 
efficient use of my days, and I am obliged to give 
up the feio visits which would be really attractive 
and fruitful in order to avoid the many visits which 
would be the reverse." Other reasons for the same 
course are obvious ; but those mentioned were, no 
doubt, genuine and sufficient. The rest of her life was 
passed with very little indulgence in society. Lewes's 
children formed part of the household, though they 
were mainly educated abroad. They were on thoroughly 
affectionate terms with her ; and, for the most part, she 
led a quiet domestic life, finding her chief recreation 
in music. She read, she says, slowly ; but she read 
much, eschewing most modern literature of the lighter 
kind, and absorbing very thoroughly what she did 
read. The Life, afterwards published by Mr. Cross, 
was made upon the plan, no doubt the right one, of 
telling her story from her own letters. There were, 
however, few incidents to be told ; and Lewes under- 
took most of her correspondence. One result is that 
comparatively little is told in her letters of her later 
mental history. A great part of the correspondence 



120 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

consists of accounts of holiday tours, which cannot be 
said to have any remarkable interest. In 1860, after 
finishing the Mill on the Floss, she made a three 
months' tour in Italy. Visits to Italy have been a 
turning-point in the lives of many great English 
writers ; and this tour had, as we shall see, a very 
important effect upon George Eliot. The diary and 
letters, however, in which it is described leave a 
disappointing blank. The Leweses saw Rome, Naples, 
Florence, Venice, Milan, and other famous places ; 
went most conscientiously through all the regular 
sights ; and, of course, made plenty of judicious and 
intelligent remarks. In Florence, for example, they 
admire " Brunelleschi's mighty dome " and " Giotto's 
incomparable campanile." They visit the palaces and 
the churches, and we have a list of the art treasures 
which specially attract them in the Pitti Palace and 
the Uffizi Gallery. In the Pitti Palace " there is a 
remarkably fine sea piece by Salvator Rosa ; a striking 
portrait of Aretino, and a portrait of Vesalius by 
Titian ; one of Inghirami by Raphael ; a delicious rosy 
baby — future cardinal — lying on a silken bed; a placid 
contemplative young woman, with her finger between 
the leaves of a book, by Leonardo da Vinci" — and 
so forth. No doubt it is all true ; only one has read 
something very like it before; and with the help of 
Baedeker and Murray one might make out such a list 
without being a great author. Of course, it would be 
absurd to infer that George Elipt did not receive many 
impressions which she did not confide to her diary. I 
must, however, confess that there is, to my mind, 
something characteristic in the docility with which she 
accepts the part of the intelligent sightseer. There 



VIII.] MIDDLE LIFE 121 

are plenty of appreciative remarks ; but none of those 
brilliant flashes with which Kuskin could light up the 
well-worn topics of descriptive enthusiasm, and couch 
our dull eyes to new aspects of familiar beauties. 
We feel that the man of genius gives his personal 
impressions, which are, therefore, more or less governed 
by accident or prejudice, but which, nevertheless, 
extort a partial assent, and at the lowest make us 
more vividly conscious of one element in our emotions. 
George Eliot, so far as this diary goes, seems to be 
simply recording the verdicts already pronounced by 
the most enlightened and respectable authorities. 



CHAPTER IX 

ROMOLA 

The inference which I have just suggested may seem 
to be contradicted by facts. While at Florence George 
Eliot conceived " a great project," of which she wrote 
to Blackwood during her homeward journey. She is 
anxious to keep it secret, and it will require a great 
deal of " study and labour," but she is '' athirst 
to begin." The project, as she shortly afterwards 
explains, is for a historical novel, the scene to be 
Florence, and the period that of Savonarola's career. 
She postponed the work, however, till she had finished 
Silas Marner, and then made another visit to Florence 
in the spring of 1861. She spent thirty-four days 
there in May and June, devoting the morning hours 
to " looking at streets, books, and pictures, in hunting 
up old books at shops and stalls, or in reading at the 
Magliabecchian Library." She feels ''very brave," 
and enjoys the thought of work. "It may turn out," 
she adds, " that I can't work freely and full enough 
in the medium I have chosen, and in that case I must 
give it up ; for I Avill never write anything to which 
my whole heart, mind, and conscience don't consent ; 
so that I may feel it was something — however small 
— which wanted to be done in this Avorld, and that 
I am just the organ for that small bit of work." 

122 



CHAP. IX.] BOMOLA 123 

Nobody, it may safely be said, could have undertaken 
a great task in a more conscientious spirit. She was, 
as usual, tormented by "hopelessness and melancholy." 
In August I " got," she says, " into a state of so much 
wretchedness in attempting to concentrate my thoughts 
on the construction of my novel, that I became despe- 
rate, and suddenly burst my bonds, saying, I will not 
think of writing." A week later, however, she con- 
ceives her plot " with new distinctness." Gradually 
she gets to work, and "crams" — if the Avord may pass 
— with amazing diligence. A list of the books which 
she read during the last half of 1861 gives some 
illustration of the course of study. Among them are 
Villari's and Burlamacchi's lives of Savonarola, Machi- 
avelli, Petrarch, and other Italian authors, Sismondi's 
history of the Italian republics, besides various excur- 
sions into Gibbon, Hallam, Heeren, and Muratori, and 
occasional digressions into other literary regions. She 
began Romola "again" on January 1, 1862, and a note 
of three weeks later is suggestive. She has been " de- 
tained from writing by the necessity of gathering par- 
ticulars, first, about Lorenzo de' Medici's death; sec- 
ondly, about the possible retardation of Easter; third, 
about Corpus Christi Day ; fourthly, about Savonarola's 
preaching in the Quaresima of 1492." She also fin- 
ished La Mandragola — a second reading for the sake 
of Florentine expressions — and began La Calendra. 
The question will intrude, What would have become of 
Ivanhoe if Scott had bothered himself about the possible 
retardation of Easter ? The answer, indeed, is obvious, 
that Ivanhoe would not have been written. One of the 
results to George Eliot of this excessive conscientious- 
ness is what might be anticipated. She has looked 



124 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

into some of the notebooks in wliich she recorded her 
former fits of depression; "but," she says, "it is 
impossible for me to believe that I have ever been 
in so unpromising and despairing a state as I now 
feel." She has, however, made a start, and is as usual 
encouraged by Lewes's applause. 

Soon after this George Smith, the eminent pub- 
lisher, offered £10,000 for the copyright of the new 
novel, of which some report had got abroad. He 
wished it to appear, in the Cornhill Mcigazine, which 
was still in its brilliant youth. Thackeray was just 
retiring from the editorship, but he and many others 
of the most eminent writers of the day were still 
contributors. George Eliot had only written about 
sixty pages of her story, and was still in the depths of 
depression. She doubted whether it would ever be 
finished or ever good for anything. Offers of £10,000 
are cheering even to the most high-minded authors. 
Greater sums have been made by successfvil novelists 
in recent years, but at that time the proposal was one, 
as Lewes said, of "unheard-of magnificence." She 
declined it at first on the ground of her unwillingness 
to begin the publication at the early date first fixed by 
Smith (May). Afterwards, however, she accepted 
£7000 for its appearance in the Cornhill, where it 
accordingly came out in fourteen parts, from July 
1862 to August 1863. She had finished the last 
number on the 9th June 1863. Lewes advised her to 
accept this periodical mode of publication, because he 
thought that the book would have the advantage of 
being studied slowly and deliberately, instead of being 
read at a gallop. It is understood that the experiment 
was not a success in the magazine from the com- 



IX.] B02I0LA 125 

mercial point of view. To make up in some degree 
for this disappointment, she made a present to the 
Cornhill of Brother Jacob — the short and not very 
satisfactory story previously written. Romola was not 
well adapted for being broken up into fragments, and 
some people, it appears, evaded Lewes's ingenious trap. 
They waited till the work came out as a whole, or 
preferred not reading it at all to reading it '' slowly." 
Perhaps it was too good for an audience of average 
readers. She received a great deal of pretty encour- 
agement "from immense big-wigs — some of them 
saying that Romola is the finest book they ever read." 
Some '* big-wigs " were less enthusiastic, but the more 
orthodox opinion was that Romola was a literary 
masterpiece, though full recognition of its merits was 
a proof of superior taste. The success, to whatever it 
amounted, had been won at a heavy cost. She felt at 
times as though she were working under a- heavy 
leaden weight. The writing "ploughed into her" 
more than any of her other books. She began it, she 
said, as a young woman, and finished it as an old 
woman. 

It would be absurd to speak without profound 
respect of a book which represents the application of 
an exceptionally powerful intellect carrying out a 
great scheme with so serious and sustained a purpose. 
The critic may well be unwilling to place himself in 
the seat of judgment, or to suppose that he can divine 
with any confidence what will be the opinion of 
posterity, if that vague and multitudinous body 
troubles itself to arrive at any definite opinion on the 
matter. On the other hand, it is not very difiicult to 
say what one thinks oneself, and one may hope to 



126 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

suggest a remark or two which may be worth at least 
the trouble of refuting. Romola is to me one of the 
most provoking of books. I am alternately seduced 
into admiration and repelled by what seems to me a 
most lamentable misapplication of first-rate powers. 
I will speak frankly on both topics, without pretending 
to reach a precise valuation of merits. 

The " historical novel " is a literary hybrid which 
is apt to offend opposite sides. Either the historian 
condemns it for its inaccuracy, or the novel-reader 
complains of its dulness. It is hard to avoid that 
Scylla and Charybdis. In my youth, I remember that 
classical students used to pore over two lively works, 
Gallus and Charides, which represented the efforts of a 
German professor to empty a dictionary of classical 
antiquities into the framework of a novel. They were 
no doubt accurate, but I don't know whether anybody 
ever read them through. Scott's historical romances, 
on the other hand, fascinated the world, but are 
generally marked by a gallant indifference to any 
quantity of anachronisms. A historical critic, I 
suppose, would tear Ivanhoe to pieces, and forbid any 
student to read a book which would confuse his ideas 
in direct proportion to the literary attractiveness. 
Of course, we may request the historical critic to mind 
his own business. I have often thought that the 
beginning of Ivanhoe, the scene in the forest where 
Gurth and Wamba are chatting at the foot of the old 
barrow, and encounter the Templar and the Prior on 
their way to Cedric's house, is the best opening of a 
story ever written. It is inimitably graphic and 
picturesque, and introduces us at once to a set of 
actors most dramatically contrasted. Moreover, the 



IX.] EOMOLA 127 

interest does not flag till certain unfortunate con- 
cessions to the old-fashioned rules of story-telling 
spoil the concluding scenes. Still it is true that the 
indifference to accuracy, or even possibility, forces one 
to admit that it requires a rather juvenile readiness to 
accept the obvious unrealities. It suggests the thought 
that the charm might be even heightened if, for ex- 
ample, Robin Hood and Friar Tuck had a little stronger 
resemblance to real or at least possible outlaws. The 
problem had been attacked by two or three of George 
Eliot's contemporaries. Bulwer in Rienzi had, like 
George Eliot, found a theme in Italian history, besides 
dealing with Harold and with Warwick the Last of the 
Barons. Though Freeman admired Harold, and George 
Eliot read Rienzi respectfully, I do not suppose that 
these rapid dashes into a mixture of fiction, history, 
and political philosophy can now interest any one. 
Kingsley in Hypatia and Westicard Ho ! had shown 
abundant vigour as a story-teller, in spite of a large 
infusion of the religious and political pamphleteer ; 
but did not convince readers that he had given the 
true spirit of his periods. Charles Reade's remarkable 
novel The Cloister and the Hearth, which appeared in 
1861, was a more serious attempt to make general 
history into fiction, and has been greatly admired by 
some eminent critics, such as Mr. Swinburne, who 
possibly have in mind the comparison with Romola. 
I only mention these books, however, to justify the 
remark that, in a period when the serious study of 
history was developing, the attempt to combine the 
vigour of Scott with more thorough knowledge of 
facts represented a very natural and plausible enter- 
prise. 



128 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

It may be taken for granted that the first condition 
of success is that you sliould become a contemporary 
of the society described. It is no easy task to go 
back for some centuries ; to immerse yourself so 
tlioroughly in the extinct modes of thought and 
sentiment that you can instinctively feel what the 
actors would have felt under the supposed circum- 
stances. You can see into the mind of a British rustic 
of sixty years ago, especially if you happen to have 
been his daughter ; but to get back to the inhabitant 
of Florence in the fifteenth century requires a more 
difficult transformation. Did George Eliot achieve it 
even approximately? To that, as it seems to me, 
there can be but one answer. She saw most clearly 
that the feat was necessary. She tried to qiialify 
herself most industriously, but the very nature of her 
preparation shows the extreme difficulty, or, as I think, 
the impracticability of the task. " She spent," says 
an admiring critic, '"'six weeks" (really seven) ''in 
Florence in order to familiarise herself with the 
manners and conversation of the inhabitants." In 
spite of this, it is said, her characters, when she began 
to write, not only " refused to speak Italian to her, 
but refused to speak at all." By hard reading, how- 
ever, she reduced " these recalcitrant spirits to order," 
and " succeeded so well, especially in her delineation 
of the lower classes, that they have been recognised 
by Italians as true to life." The Italians are 
an eminently intelligent as well as an eminently 
courteous people ; and we will hope that these 
anonymous critics had not to put any great strain 
upon their consciences. Yet one cannot help con- 
trasting this initiation into the Italian characteristics 



IX.] ROMOLA 129 

with the unconscious process which had lasted for 
twenty years at Chilvers-Coton. Seven weeks is 
a brief period for acclimatisation in a new social 
atmosphere. If an intelligent Italian lady had spent 
seven weeks at the Charing Cross Hotel, walked 
diligently about Leicester Square and the Strand, 
read steadily at the British Museum, and rummaged 
old bookshops in back streets, how much knowledge 
woilld she have acquired of the British costermonger ? 
Ko doubt with the help of a few books on London 
labour, and study of Sam Weller's cockney slang, 
she might manage to make him talk and behave him- 
self in such a way that a critic could not put his finger 
upon any directly assignable blunder. There is, too, 
a certain likeness between human beings everywhere, 
which might save the costermonger from being a mere 
monstrosity. But one would not expect a very vivid 
realisation of the genuine Englishman ; nor can I 
sge any indications that the description of the Italian 
"lower classes" in Romola gets beyond careful obser- 
vance of costume and commonplace. George Eliot had 
not, like some novelists, been primarily interested in 
a period, steeped her mind in its literature simply for 
the love of it, and then felt a prompting to give form 
to her impressions. "■ They," said Scott, speaking of 
certain imitators, " have to read old books and consult 
antiquarian collections to get their knowledge. I write 
because I have long since read such works, and possess, 
thanks to a strong memory, the information which 
they have to seek for." ^ George Eliot had, it is to be 
presumed, a fair knowledge of the general outlines of 
history. She came to Florence as a highly intelligent 
1 Journal, i. 275. 



130 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

sightseer ; and it then struck her that "■ the place would 
make a picturesque background, and that the Savona- 
rola period offered a number of interesting situations. 
She proceeded to get up the necessary knowledge; 
but with the result like that which happens when a 
manager presents Julius CcMsar or Coriolanus in the 
costume '' of the period." The costume may be as cor- 
rect as the manager's archeeological knowledge allows, 
but Julius Csesar and Coriolanus remain what Shakes- 
peare made them, not ancient Romans at all, but 
frankly and unmistakably Elizabethans. 

Meanwhile the attempt to be historically accurate 
has a painfully numbing effect on her imagination. She 
seems to be always trembling at the possibility of an 
intruding anachronism. She tells an admirable critic, 
R. H. Hutton, that " there is scarcely a phrase, an in- 
cident, an allusion [in Boniola'] that did not gather its 
value to me from its supposed subservience to my main 
artistic purpose." She always strives after as full a 
vision of the medium in which a "character moves 
as of the character itself. The psychological causes 
which prompted me to give such details of Florentine 
life and history as I have given are precisely the same 
as those which determined me in giving the details 
of English village life." That, no doub.t, is perfectly 
true; but then she had seen the English details with her 
own eyes, and she only makes a judicious selection from 
authorities when describing Florentine details. There 
was, it appears, an article of dress called a " scarsella," 
which always gets upon my nerves in RomoJa. The 
thing will intrude without any (to me) perceptible 
relation to her " main artistic purpose." The scarlet 
waistcoats and brand-new white smock-frocks in Adam 



IX.] ROMOLA 131 

Bede make a picture at once. We see the rustics on 
their way to the squire's feast; but this wretched 
scarsella worries me, and only suggests a hint for 
Leighton's illustrations. A more important result 
of this weakness is shown in another case defended 
by George Eliot herself. She complains that "the 
general ignorance of old Florentine literature " and 
other causes have led to misunderstandings of nuiny 
parts of Romola — " the scene of the quack doctor 
and the monkey, for example, which is a specimen 
not of humour as I relish it, but of the practical 
joking which was the amusement of the gravest old 
Florentines, and without which no conception of them 
would be historical. The whole piquancy of that scene 
in question was intended to lie in the antithesis 
between the puerility which stood for wit and humour 
in the old republic, and the majesty of its front in 
graver matters." She appeals to the precedent of the 
chase of the false herald in Quentin Dunoard, winch 
makes Louis xi. and Charles of Burgundy " laugh even 
to tears." Now, I am quite unable to speak of the 
historical accuracy. All one can say is that if the 
ancient Florentines laughed so heartily at the dreary 
joke of imposing a monkey upon a quack for a baby, 
they must have been duller than one would have 
supposed. The precedent from Scott is curiously in- 
applicable. The scene in Quentin Diincard is effective 
and an essential part of the story, because the "joke" 
shows both the brutality of the performers and the 
cunning of Louis xi. The king is skilfully getting rid 
of a cast-off agent in his intrigues against Charles with 
the help of Charles himself. To detail a wearisome 
practical joke in all its native unadulterated badness in 



132 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

order to make a contrast with other parts of the book 
is a hazardous experiment. It is to be deliberately 
dull, because history proves that people could be dull 
four centuries ago. The truth is that in her English 
books George Eliot can make bad joking amusing, 
because she makes us smile not at the joke, but at the 
jokers. The talkers at the "Rainbow" are inimitable, 
because their talk is so pointless. Here the incon- 
gruity which is to interest us has to be gradually 
inferred from subsequent reflection, and the writer 
falls into the common error of boring us by describ- 
ing bores. 

These are trifling illustrations of the more general 
difficulty. Romola is to give us the spirit of the 
Renaissance. It requires no dissertation to show 
why the Renaissance should have a surpassing charm 
for the imagination. There is, I suppose, no book 
which opens the eyes of the respectable modern reader 
with more startling effect than the autobiography of 
Benvenuto Cellini in the next generation. The com- 
bination of artistic inspiration, intellectual audacity, 
gross superstition, and supreme indifference to moral- 
ity, gives the shock of entering a new world where 
all established formulae break down, or are in a chaotic 
state of internecine conflict. "When we take up a book 
in which one is to be a contemporary with the Borgias, 
and to have personal interviews with Machiavelli, 
we may expect a similar sensation. We are to be 
spectators of a state of things in which the element- 
ary human passions have been let loose, when violence 
and treachery are normal parts of the day's work, where 
new intellectual horizons have opened, and yet the 
old creeds are still potent, and there is the strangest 



IX.] BOMOLA 133 

mingliug of high aspirations and brutal indulgence, 
when the nobler and baser elements of belief are so 
strangely blended that the ruffian is still religious, and 
the enlightened reformer fanatically superstitious. If 
anybody derives any vivid impressions of such a world 
from Romola, his eyes must be much keener than mine. 
George Eliot has, it must be noticed, chosen one of 
the two alternatives which are open to the historical 
novelist. She deals with a private history and the 
great public characters, and their political proceed- 
ings remain for the most part in the background. 
Savonarola, indeed, has to act in the story as well as 
in the history. Hutton considers the portrait of the 
reformer to be one of George Eliot's great triumphs, 
and appeals especially to one scene. I am the more 
glad to be able to point to an appreciative and 
genial criticism, as I have to confess my inability to 
accept it. I should have taken the same scene for 
the clearest illustration of failure. The prophet is in 
his cell. He is trying to make np his mind to accept 
the test proposed by his enemies. Representatives 
of both parties are to walk through fire, counting upon 
a miraculous intervention ; the flames are to burn 
the heretic and spare the orthodox. Savonarola's 
enthusiasm prompts him to run the risk ; but when 
he tries to imagine the scene, the flesh shrinks, he 
begins to suspect that the appeal may be presumptuous, 
and is well aware at the bottom of his mind that it 
is a trap devised by his enemies. To show Savonarola 
tortured by these conflicting impulses would no doubt 
require the highest dramatic genius. What we really 
have is not the concrete man at all, but a long and very 
able psychological analysis of his mental state. A 



134 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

bit of it gets into invei'ted commas to pass for a soli- 
loquy ; but instead of seeing and hearing Savonarola, 
we are really listening through several pages to a 
highly intelligent lecture upon an interesting specimen. 
The style becomes cumbrous and flagging. I venture 
to quote a long sentence as a specimen of George Eliot 
at her worst. The acceptance of the ordeal is inevit- 
able : " IS'ot that Savonarola had uttered and written 
a falsity when he declared his belief in a future super- 
natural attestation of his work ; but his mind was so 
constituted that while it was easy for him to believe 
in a miracle which, being distant and undefined, was 
screened behind the strong reasons he saw for its 
occurrence, and yet easier for him to have a belief in 
inward miracles such as his own prophetic inspiration 
and divinely-wrought intuitions, it was at the same 
time insurmountably diflicult to him to believe in the 
probability of a miracle which, like this of being carried 
unhurt through the fire, pressed in all its details on his 
imagination and involved a demand not only for belief 
but for exceptional action." Savonarola's mind was 
surely, in this respect, constituted like most people's ; 
we all think that we can bear the dentist's forceps till 
we get into his armchair ; but this almost Germanic 
concatenation of clauses not only puts such obvious 
truths languidly, but keeps Savonarola himself at a 
distance. We are not listening to a Hamlet, but to a 
judicious critic analysing the state of mind which 
prompts " to be or not to be." The same languor 
affects all the historical framework of the story. We 
come upon many scenes which seem to demand a 
forcible presentation : the entry of the French into 
Florence ; the " bonfire of Vanities " ; and the strange 



IX.] ROMOLA 135 

tragicomedy of the ordeal ; but when we want to see 
the crowd and bustle and the play of popular fun and 
passion, we get careful narrative; and as half of it — 
we do not know which half — is obviously only fiction, 
we think that we might as well have been reading 
Guicciardini or Professor Villari. The story of the 
political intrigues is necessary to determine the fate 
of the characters ; but it is as dull as any of the 
ordinary history books. Machiavelli talks, but he 
talks like a book, and does not manage one really good 
bit of JNIephistophelian cynicism. The great men of 
Florence seem to be as prosy when they are feasting 
as when they are playing practical jokes. One of them 
receives credit for " short and pithy " speech to which 
the " formal dignity " of his interlocutor is an amusing 
contrast. This short and pithy gentleman manages to 
take a page to say that he takes the Savonarola party 
to be composed of psalm-singing humbugs, not to be 
trusted by men of sense. 

If my irreverence reveals a real defect in my author 
instead of myself, I think that the defect is explicable. 
George Eliot, I have suggested, was a woman ; a woman, 
too, of rather delicate health, exhausted by hard work ; 
and, moreover, a woman who, in spite of her philosophy, 
was eminently respectable, and brought up in a quiet 
middle-class atmosphere. " To bring in a lion among 
ladies is a most dreadful thing," we know, " and there 
is not a more fearful wildfowl than your lion living." 
Benvenuto Cellini would certainly have been " a fearful 
wildfowl" in St. John's Wood; and though by dint of 
conscientious reading George Eliot kne\^ a great deal 
about the ruffian geniuses of the Renaissance, she 
could not throw herself into any real sympathy with 



136 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

them. Such a feat required the audacity of a Victor 
Hugo and, perhaps, the indifference to propriety of a 
modern realist. The criticism would be summed up 
by calling the book " academic " ; meaning, I take it, 
that it suggests the professor's chair ; and implies the 
belief that a careful study of authorities, and scrupu- 
lous attention to aesthetic canons, will be a sufficient 
outfit for a journey into the regions of romance. 
George Eliot was not blind to such considerations ; and 
George Lewes, in his capacity of critic, could put them 
very keenly in writing of other people. His enthusi- 
astic admiration for George Eliot perhaps obscured to 
him what he would have been the first to see else- 
where ; and, anyhow, he encouraged her tendencies to 
a questionable direction of her genius. 

Yet I do not deny that there was much to be said for 
the judgment of the contemporary critics who held that 
Romola would be one of the permanent masterpieces 
of English literature. Before I can adjust my own 
impressions to theirs, I must be allowed to remove 
from my mind any lingering impression that Romola 
and Tito lived at Florence in the fifteenth century. 
They were only masquerading there, and getting the 
necessary "properties" from the history-shops at 
which such things are provided for the diligent 
student. Eomola was, I take it, a cousin of Maggie 
Tulliver, though of loftier character, and provided with 
a thorough classical culture. The religious crisis 
through which she had to pass was not due to 
Savonarola, but to modern controversies. The an- 
tagonistic principles which were in conflict in the 
Renaissance period are still in existence, though they 
have entered into different combinations, and are 



IX.] BOMOLA 137 

tested by different issues. There are still Machiavel- 
lians, I believe, in politics, and Epicureans in art and 
morals, and the tender soul still finds something of the 
charm in the Catholic ideal of life vs^hich appealed to 
Romola through Savonarola. If, therefore, we venture 
to drop the history, or to consider it as a mere con- 
ventional background, we can still be interested in the 
real subject of the book, the ordeal through which 
E/Omola has to pass, and the tragedy of a high feminine 
nature exposed to such doubts and conflicting impulses 
as may still present themselves in different shapes. I 
could wish, indeed, that there were a good deal less his- 
tory, or that it had been handled with more audacity. 
But for all that, Eomolaand her immediate surroundings 
make a very impressive group, which may affect us like 
some masterpiece in which a painter has made use of 
conventional and unreal accessories. The central idea, 
or, if we choose to say so, the " moral " of the book, is 
clearly indicated. The pressing problem for Romola, 
we are told, when she comes under the influence of 
Savonarola, is not to settle questions of controversy, 
but *' to keep alive that flame of unselfish emotion by 
which a life of sadness might well be a life of active 
love." She is so moved by the *' grand energies " of 
the prophet's nature that she can listen patiently even 
to his prophecies. She is profoundly impressed in the 
scene in which he comes nearest to being a living per- 
son ; and tells her that to run away from her husband 
is really to be self-willed and moved by selfish purposes. 
She is to "make her marriage-sorrows an offering" 
and to live for Florence, where she has been placed 
by God, who addresses her through her teacher. The 
light abandonment of ties because they have ceased 



138 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

to be pleasant is " the uprooting of social and personal 
virtue." Her marriage has ceased to be for her the 
" mystic union which is its own guarantee of indis- 
solubleness " ; and there is no compensation " for the 
woman who feels that the chief relation of her life has 
been no more than a mistake." She has lost her crown. 
The deepest secret of human blessedness has half 
whispered itself "to her and then for ever passed 
away." She accepts the position till presently even 
Savonarola ceases to command her confidence. She 
finds that he can hoodwink his conscience for the 
benefit of his sect. "No one who has ever known 
what it is to lose faith in a fellow-man whom he has 
profoundly loved and reverenced will lightly say that 
the shock can leave the faith in an Invisible Goodness 
unshaken." Komola despairs of finding any consistent 
duty. " What force was there to create for her that 
supremely hallowed motive which men call duty, but 
which can have no inward constraining existence 
through some form of constraining love ? " The solu- 
tion, so far as there is one, comes in a form which one 
cannot altogether admire. Poor Romola, in her despair, 
gets into a miscellaneous boat lying ashore ; and the 
boat drifts away in a manner rarely practised by boats 
in real life, and spontaneously lands her in a place 
where everybody is dying of the plague, and she can 
therefore make herself useful to her fellow-creatures. 
She clearly ought to have been drowned, like Maggie, 
and we feel that Providence is made to interfere rather 
awkwardly. Perhaps, too, Romola's sentiments show 
rather too clearly that she has been prematurely im- 
pressed by the Positivist " religion of humanity." But 
a fine nature torn by conflicting duties and ideals, and 



IX.] BOM OLA 139 

endeavouring to find some worthy conciliation, pre- 
sents an admirable theme, and often enables George 
Eliot to show her highest powers of delineation. Read- 
ers in general cannot feel quite so warmly to Eomola 
as to the childish Maggie; she is a little too hard and 
statuesque, and drops her husband rather too coolly 
and decisively as soon as she finds out that he is 
capable of disregarding her sentiments. Still she is 
one of the few figures who occupy a permanent and 
peculiar niche in the great gallery of fiction ; and if 
she is a trifle chilly and over-dignified, one must admit 
that she is not the less lifelike. She is, moreover, the 
only one — to my feeling — of George Eliot's women 
whose marriage has not something annoying. She 
marries a thorough scoundrel, it is true, but the mis- 
conception to which she falls a victim is one which we 
feel to be thoroughly natural under the circumstances. 
Her husband, Tito, is frequently mentioned as one of 
George Eliot's greatest triumphs. The cause of her 
success is, as I take it, that Tito is thoroughly and 
to his fingers' ends a woman. I do not intend to 
condemn the conception, for undoubtedly there are 
men whose characters are essentially feminine. Tito 
is of the material of which the Delilahs are made, the 
treacherous, caressing, sensuous creatures who involve 
strong men in their meshes as Tito fascinates the rather 
masculine Romola. In several of her novels George Eliot 
contrasts the higher feminine nature with this lower 
type. Dinah Morris is relieved against the "kitten- 
like " Hetty ; Maggie against Lucy Deane ; and Doro- 
thea against Celia Brooke ; and in Eomola itself we 
have Tessa, who, indeed, is so much of a kitten that 
she approaches very nearly to be an idiot. Tito is the 



140 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

kitten, or rather the panther-cub, grown to full size, 
and showing all the grace and malignity of his kind. 
He has the feminine nervousness, and " trembles like a 
maid at sight of spear and shield." When he catches 
sight of an enemy with a dagger, his face at once 
commends itself to a painter for the exhibition of the 
passion of fear. He is not cruel out of mere badness, 
but from effeminacy ; he dislikes the sight of suffer- 
ing, and would rather not inflict it where he must be 
a witness of it; but he can suppress the sympathy 
instead of the suffering, and doe^ not mind how much 
his victims suffer so long as they are out of his sight. 
He has " a native repugnance to sights of death and 
pain," and would rather get rid of an enemy by exiling 
him than by putting him to death. But when the 
sentence is passed, he is comforted by reflecting 
upon the security which will come to him when the 
enemy's head is well off his shoulders. He is so 
thoroughly feminine that we have to be reminded 
that he could on occasion show " a masculine effec- 
tiveness of intellect and purpose." When he is fairly 
driven into a corner, that is, he can show his claws 
and act, for once, like a man. But his general posi- 
tion among his more violent associates is like that 
of a beautiful and treacherous woman who makes 
delicate caressing and ingenious equivocation do the 
work of the rougher and more downright masculine 
methods. He is most admirably adapted to impose 
upon his high-minded wife, who has the reluctance 
to admit suspicion which marks noble and simple 
characters, but is also apt, unfortunately, to imply 
a deficiency of common sense. The tragedy which 
follows for Eomola is inevitable, and is developed 



IX.] BO MO LA 141 

with George Eliot's full power. If we can put 
aside the historical paraphernalia, forget the dates 
and the historical Savonarola and Machiavelli, there 
remains a singularly powerful representation of an 
interesting spiritual history ; of the ordeal through 
which a lofty nature has to pass when brought into 
collision with characters of baser composition ; thrown 
into despair by the successive collapses of each of the 
supports to which it clings ; and finding some solution 
in spite of its bewilderment amidst conflicting gospels, 
in each of which truth and falsehood are strangely 
mixed. There is hardly any novel, except the Mill on 
the Floss, in which the stages in the inner life of a 
thoughtful and tender nature are set forth with so 
much tenderness and sympathy. If Romola is far less 
attractive than Maggie, her story is more consistently 
developed to the end. 8he may remind us of another 
heroine who once set everybody weeping — although 
the histories of the two are in most respects diametri- 
cally contrasted. Clarissa Harlowe had very different 
troubles to undergo; she was too well instructed in 
the doctrines of the Church of England to be bothered 
by any religious doubts ; and the respectable society 
in which she was brought up had no affinity to the 
Renaissance. The similarity is chiefly confined to 
the fact that both stories have a moral and a unity 
of interest, dependent upon a model young woman as 
the central figure, but there is one other resemblance : 
Clarissa's troubles, like Eomola's, raise the question 
whether the moral conventions of the society in which 
she lives have a sanctity which should forbid the 
individual woman ever to defy them on behalf of 
her own happiness. It is curious that upon that 



142 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. ix. 

point George Eliot seems on the whole to agree with 
Richardson. Romola is perplexed by the thought that 
the " law is sacred," but that " rebellion may be sacred 
too." There are moments in life when the soul must 
dare to act on its own " warrant," though the punish- 
ment may be incurred if the warrant has been false. 
Clarissa incurs all her troubles by running away from 
home, and Romola by her revolt against her husband ; 
and though Romola hnally escapes with her life, she 
has to suffer a heavy penalty. It is only, however, 
upon the general point that T mean to insist. Hardly 
any heroine since Clarissa has been so effective a centre 
of interest as Romola ; and if I regret that she was 
moved out of her own century and surrounded by a 
mass of irrelevant matter of antiquarian or sub-histori- 
cal interest, I will not presume to quarrel with people 
who do not admit the incongruity. 



CHAPTER X 

FELIX HOLT 

George Eliot had first become known as a writer (by 
'^ Amos Barton ") in January 1857. When the conehid- 
ing part of Romola appeared within six years, she had 
reached the first rank among her contemporaries. She 
had published within that time five novels of the highest 
excellence, and it is at least doubtful whether she was 
ever again to reach an equally high mark. The effort 
had been very great, and for the next two years she 
seems to have allowed her mind to lie fallow. Then 
she took up a new book, of which I shall have to speak 
presently, although nothing was published until 1866. 
In November 1863 the Leweses settled at the Priory, 
21 North Bank, Regent's Park. This house came to 
be especially associated with her memory. She 
did not go out into society ; but many people were 
attracted by the fame of the great authoress, and 
found admission to her house. Gradually she came 
to hold a Sunday afternoon reception, frequented by 
worshippers of genius and by a large circle of friends, 
of whom only the more intimate had the privilege of 
seeing her upon other days. It is needless to say that 
at meetings of that kind — in England at least, for we 
are told that in France things are better — there is 
often a painful sense of awkwardness. The shyness 
143 



144 GEOKGE ELIOT [chap. 

generated by the desire to prove that your homage is 
genuine, and that you are so brilliant a person that 
it is also worth having, gives one of those painful 
sensations which is not least among the minor miseries 
of life. It may, I think, be said that the evil was 
reduced to a minimum on those occasions at the 
Priory. George Lewes, in the first place, was un- 
quenchable. He was always full of anecdote and 
vivacious repartee ; and while more serious interviews 
were taking place at the centre of the circle, there 
would be a little knot on the periphery which was a 
focus of laughter and good-humoured fun. It was a 
rather awful moment for the neophyte when he was 
presented to the quiet and dignified lady seated in 
her armchair, to stammer out the appropriate remarks 
which sometimes failed to present themselves before 
he had to make room for a new comer; and if the 
company was numerous, any general conversation was 
impossible. George Eliot's gentle voice Avas not cal- 
culated, if she had desired such a result, to hold the 
attention of a roomful of receptive admirers. But if 
rainy weather had limited the audience, and the tenta- 
tive sparks of conversation had been fanned into life, 
she could be as charming as any admirer could desire. 
Her personal appearance was intellectually attractive, 
and had a peculiar pathetic charm. She looked fragile, 
overweighted perhaps by thought, and with traces 
of the depression of which she so often complains in 
her letters. Her abundant hair, auburn-brown, in 
later years streaked with grey, was covered by a kind 
of lace mantilla. She could not be called beautiful. 
She was said to be like Savonarola, of whose face she 
remarks : " It was strong-featured, and owed all its 



X.] FELIX HOLT 145 

refinement to habits of mind and rigid discipline of 
the body." His gaze impressed Romola because it 
was one " in which simple human fellowship expressed 
itself as a strongly-felt bond." That at least might be 
applied to George Eliot. Her features were strongly 
marked, with a rather large mouth and jaw; her eyes 
a grey-blue, with very variable expression ; her hands 
were finely formed; her voice low and very musical — 
'' a contralto," it is said in singing ; and the whole ap- 
pearance expressive of a singular combination of power 
with intense sensibility. The best likeness is that by 
her friend Sir Frederick Burton, now in the iSTational 
Portrait Gallery. If her talk might be at times a 
little too solemn for the frivolous, she could brighten 
into genuine playfulness, and, on occasion, into flashes 
of hearty scorn directed against the unlucky cynic. 
If the incense offered was not always of the finest 
quality, there was no want either of dignity or gentle- 
ness in the recipient. And nobody could watch Lewes 
on such occasions without being struck b}^ the cordial 
and generous devotion of a man not too much given 
to an excess of veneration. Her belief in him was 
equally visible in her manner and every allusion to 
his work. 

It is perhaps not altogether healthy for any human 
being to live in an atmosphere from which every un- 
pleasant draught of chilling or bracing influence is 
so carefully excluded. Lewes performed the part of 
the censor who carefully prevents an autocrat from 
seeing that his flatterers are not the mouthpiece of 
the whole human race. " It is my rule," said George 
Eliot, "very strictly observed, not to read the criti- 
cisms on my writings. For years I have found this 



146 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

abstinence necessary to preserve me from that dis- 
couragement as an artist which ill-judged praise no 
less tlian ill-judged blame tends to produce in me. 
For far worse than any verdict as to the proportion 
of good and evil in our work is the painful impression 
that we exist for a public which has no discernment 
of good and evil." She spoke with a contempt for 
the average quality of contemporary criticism which — 
as the critics whom we now call contemporary belong 
to a difl'erent generation — I might perhaps venture to 
approve. But it might be an interesting question for 
an essayist whether this rule of mental hygiene be 
really sound. Since the days when Pope writhed 
under the insults of Grub Street, sensitive authors 
have called upon gods and men to pity and avenge 
them. Their moanings seem to be rather unmanly. 
Which is the proper comment upon the supposed 
slaughter of Keats : Shelley's denunciation of the 
'' deaf and murderous viper," who could crown 

" Life's early cup with sucli a draught of woe " : 

or Byron's comment — 

" 'Tis strange tlie mind, that very fiery particle, 
Should let itself be snuffed out by an article " ? 

I fancy that in these days, when authors subscribe 
to agencies for newspaper cuttings, the general verdict 
would be in favour of Byron. It would be regarded, 
that is, as a contemptible weakness to be thrown oft' 
one's balance by a ''scathing" review. Yet, it may 
be asked, if one really despises, is one bound to read ? 
It is unpleasant to be insulted even by a fool, and 
why expose oneself to a pain which can have no 



X.] FELIX HOLT 147 

good results ? Such abnormally sensitive poets as 
Tennyson and Rossetti suffered cruelly from harsh 
criticism, and it is not clear that they gained anything 
from reading it. Would they not have done better 
if they could have adopted George Eliot's method ? 
After all, what does a real genius ever learn from a 
critic ? There is, it seems to me, only one good piece 
of advice which a critic can give to an author, namely, 
that the author should dare to be himself. When he 
proceeds to tell the author what the self really is, 
he is generally mistaken, and is speaking upon a topic 
upon which he is presumably worse informed than 
the person to whom he speaks. George Eliot worked 
upon her own theories, right or wrong ; and con- 
sidering the constant diffidence and depression from 
which she suffered, it is likely enough that a study of 
the critics would only have discouraged her without 
at all directing her into a better path. Against this, 
it may perhaps be urged that George Eliot's talent 
scarcely included the rare gift of a just appreciation 
of her own limitations. It is often, and, no doubt, 
justly said, that one of Jane Austen's especial merits 
is that she never let herself be distracted from the 
sphere in Avhich she showed unsurpassed felicity. 
When she was requested to write a romance to illus- 
trate the history of the "august house of Coburg," 
she judiciously declined, and indeed refrained from 
less palpably absurd divagations. Now George Eliot, 
as I shall presently have to remark, showed what 
most people have thought to be — if not so great a mis- 
conception, still — a conspicuously erroneous estimate 
of her own special peculiarities. Perhaps, though she 
closed her ears to " deaf and murderous vipers," she 



148 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

listened with too much complacency to adoring and 
" genial " critics who collected her " wise, witty, and 
tender sayings," and took her for a great poet 
and philosopher as well as for a first-rate novelist. 
I will not affect to sum up the argument. It is only 
worth remarking that most novelists Avho have given 
effective portraits of human passion have lived in the 
world which they described, and that some character- 
istics of George Eliot's later work must be connected 
with the secluded life which circumstances and her 
temperament made congenial. She looked upon out- 
side affairs from a certain distance ; and though 
Lewes's eager interest in all manner of contemporary 
controversies kept her in touch with the more 
thoughtful minds of the day, she had little oppor- 
tunity for direct familiarity with the manners and 
customs of society. 

The year 1865 was marked by two new literary 
ventures, in both of which Lewes took some part. 
The Pall Hall Gazette was started at the beginning 
of the year, and the first number of the Fortnightly 
Review, of which Lewes was the first editor, came out 
in the following May. Both attracted many able 
writers, and the adoption of signed articles by the 
review introduced a novel practice in English journal- 
ism. George Eliot contributed a few articles to both, 
and was interested in the attempt to raise the standard 
of periodical writing. She was only distracted, how- 
ever, for the moment from more serious work. The 
notes in her diary on September 6, 1864 : '^ I am 
reading about Spain, and trying a drama on a subject 
that has fascinated me — have written the prologue, 
and am beginning the first act. But I have little 



X.] FELIX HOLT 149 

hope of making anything satisfactory." By the end 
of the year she had written three acts. On 21st 
February I860 she describes herself as " ill and very 
miserable : George has taken my drama away from 
me" — the consequence, obviously, and not the cause 
of her misery. The drama was put aside for some 
time, and by the end of March she had begun her next 
novel, Felix Holt. It was finished in a little more than 
a year. Smith, it seems, declined to give £5000 for 
it — the sum presumably fixed by Lewes ; but Black- 
wood accepted the terms, and she now returned to 
him for the rest of her life, though without any breach 
of friendship with Smith. The novel was written amid 
the visual fits of depression, and with the same elaborate 
care as its predecessors. "I finished writing," she 
says, '' after days and nights of throbbing and palpita- 
tion — chiefly, I suppose, from a nervous excitement 
which I was not strong enough to support well." She 
had been painstaking in more ways than one. She 
went through the Times of 1832-3 at the British 
Museum in order to correct her childish memories 
of the period. She is in "a horrible fidget" about 
certain assumptions in the story. She wants especially 
to have an answer to two questions : first, whether 
after the Treaty of Amiens '^ the seizure and imprison- 
ment of civilians was exceptional, and whether it was 
continued throughout the war " ; and secondly, whether 
in 1833 a person sentenced' to transportation without 
hard labour might be set at large on his arrival in the 
colony. The story again involved some complex legal 
relations. She began, it seems, by reading Sugden, 
but happily relieved herself from the need of get- 
ting up the law of real property by committing the 



150 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

problem to Mr. Frederic Harrison. The right to an 
estate must be suddenly transferred to a young woman ; 
but the ordinary novelist's device of a discovery 
that her birth was legitimate is not applicable. The 
change must be effected by the death of somebody 
Avho has himself no interest in the matter ; and both 
the actual possessor and the person to whom the right 
passes must be left in ignorance that the title to the 
estate will be affected by the death. How this is 
brought about may be discovered from the story itself. 
Mr. Harrison's law is said, as we can well believe, to 
be perfectly correct. Probably the average reader 
will be quite content to take it as correct without 
consulting Sugden. Meanwhile, he is rather bored 
by the fear that unless he clearly understands both 
the law and the facts, he will lose something essential 
to the point of the story. When one reads Wilkie 
Collins or Gaboriau, one is content to have a secret 
carefully hidden, and bits of apparent irrelevance 
introduced, because the chief pleasure is to consist in 
guessing at the connection and admiring the ingenuity 
with which the fragments of the puzzle are to be 
pieced together at the end. But in a work of such 
serious intention as Felix Holt, the mystery is felt to 
be teasing, and we should be more really interested if 
we were taken into the author's confidence at once. 
The genuine artist ought to be above the " long-lost 
heir" trick or the complicated substitutes for the old- 
fashioned device. 

This worrying perplexity which runs through the 
whole partly explains the inferiority of Felix Holt 
to its predecessors. But another change is more 
important. We have got back from Florence of the 



X.] FELIX HOLT 151 

Renaissance to the English midlands during the 
Reform Bill agitation, and for that we may be thank- 
ful. But George Eliot is no longer drawing upon the 
old memories of Griff. She turns to account an election 
riot which, we are told, she had seen in her schooldays 
at ISTuneaton ; but she is thinking mainly of the 
Coventry time. Mrs. Poyser and her dairy have 
vanished, and with them the old-world charm. We 
have no longer the peculiar glamour which invested 
the former stories ; the sense of looking at the little 
world through the harmonising atmosphere of childish 
memories and affections ; or of becoming for the nonce 
denizens of a social order, narrow enough in its 
interests, but yet wholesome, kindly, and contented. 
We have some of the old-fashioned country gentry 
and parsons who fill the subordinate parts satisfac- 
torily enough ; but the principal interest is to be in 
the county-to\\ai of Treby Magna, just waking to the 
consciousness of the great political movement outside, 
and with little enough that was romantic about its 
lawyers, tradesmen, or manufacturers. Canals and 
coal-mines and a saline spring are beginning to rouse 
it from its " old-fashioned, grazing, brewing, wool- 
packing, cheese-loading life " ; and the change only 
seems to reveal thoroughly prosaic, not to say vulgar 
and stupefying characteristics. There is no suggestion 
of any lingering fondness for an order which is essen- 
tially mean as well as obsolete. Naturally, therefore, 
we are expected to sympathise with Eelix Holt the 
Radical, who is trying to stir up this stagnant pool. 

George Eliot, in fact, is now occupied with the 
problem which is already suggested by her previous 
works. She had strong conservative tendencies, and 



152 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

a dislike for violent and one-sided reforms. Hitherto 
she had emphasised her sympathy for the higher 
purposes and aspirations which were hidden under the 
commonplace and even superstitious modes of life and 
thought. But, after all, she is also fully convinced that 
intellectual progress and a larger culture are essential 
and important; and her tenderness for the past must 
not be allowed to sanction reactionary tendencies. 
Eomola has already been troubled by the problejn 
in one phase, and it is now to be presented to us in 
various shapes. Young men or women, troubled 
with active intellects, have to rouse from their com- 
fortable slumbers and to provide themselves with an 
ideal; they will become missionaries of a new creed, 
and have the usual difficulties of the position. If 
they quarrel with the past too contemptuously, they 
may become mere visionary fanatics ; and if too much 
inclined to compromise, they may sacrifice their aspi- 
rations and yield to the benumbing influence of 
respectability. The ordinary novelist is content with 
telling us how a young couple contrive to come to- 
gether without bothering themselves at all about the 
Universe or their relation to the general progress of 
humanity. George Eliot, though her interests in 
philosophical questions may be a little too intrusive, 
may still deserve gratitude for introducing a new 
motive, and showing us the fate of young people affected 
by the unusual weakness of preoccupation with ideals. 
Felix Holt represents an experiment upon this 
theme. He is an admirable but, I fear it must be 
admitted, a far from satisfactory representative of his 
breed. He is a radical of the days of 1832; and 
George Eliot, as we have seen, had been refreshing her 



X.] FELIX HOLT 153 

memories of that period by reading the old news- 
papers, and had been surprised by the strength of the 
language about " bloated pluralists " and so forth. 
We should naturally have expected that the eloquence 
of Felix Holt would have reflected the same sentiment. 
He is a working man, and had managed to be a student 
at Glasgow, where there was plenty of good fiery 
radicalism ; and, in fact, he starts with a hearty con- 
tempt for the upper classes, and thinks a Whig no 
better than a Tory in disguise. Such a man might 
swear by Cobbett or by Owen, and would probably 
take his religious views from 'F?a\\e''s Age of Reason. 
He would be of the stuff of which the Chartists were 
soon to be made ; would believe that the millennium 
was to be introduced by the famous six points ; and 
would certainly favour the abolition of the monarchy 
and the House of Lords and the confiscation of Church 
property. George Eliot might have shown us how 
such doctrines were a natural, though it might be, a 
too precipitate outcome of really philanthropic and 
generous feelings in a man of the day. Ebenezer 
Elliott, the " Tyrtaeus " of the Anti-Corn Law move- 
ment, and Thomas Cooper, the Chartist poet, were 
men in Felix Holt's position, who shared his vehe- 
mence and came to be alienated from the violent 
section of their allies. Felix Holt, however, has to be 
a model young man, and therefore he sees from the 
first the errors of contemporary zealots. When a 
self-styled radical orator addresses a public meeting 
and demands "universal suffrage," and the other points 
of the Charter, Felix appeals to reason. Systems of 
suffrage and the rest, he tells the mob, are engines : 
the force that is to work them must come from men's 



154 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

passions. No scheme will do good, therefore, unless 
the power behind it takes a right direction. The 
" steam that is to work the engines " is public opinion, 
that is, "the ruling belief in society about what is 
right and what is wrong, Avhat is honourable and what 
is shameful." Nothing, therefore, is to be expected 
from a party which sanctions bribery and corruption. 
When Felix makes a personal application of this lofty 
doctrine by pointing out that the agent of his own 
party is an embodiment of corruption, he naturally 
produces loud cheers ; but the doctrine itself, however 
philosophical, would hardly have pleased his audience. 
Soon after the appearance of the novel George 
Eliot published in Blackwood "An Address to Working 
Men, by Felix Holt," which enforces the same moral. 
It may be, as I believe myself, that her principle 
is a very sound one. Still one perceives that it is a 
principle which will be much more easily accepted 
by readers of BlackivoocVs 3fagazine than by the 
"working man" to whom it is ostensibly addressed. 
He will only see that it is a highly convenient argu- 
ment for putting off all reform. With that, however, 
I am not concerned. The effect in the novel is to 
take the sting out of the hero. He is too reasonable 
for his part. He is introduced as a redhot radical, and 
shows it by extreme rudeness to Esther, whom he 
suspects of fine-ladyism. Esther, being an admirable 
young woman, comes to see that he is right, and even 
that there is something complimentary in his exaspera- 
tion against her. I should have liked him better if he 
had been exasperated to rudeness against his political 
enemies, and shown his sound judgment l)y gentle 
treatment of the trifling petulance of a pretty girl. 



X.] FELIX HOLT 155 

No doubt, Felix is an honourable man, for he refuses 
to live upon a quack medicine or to look leniently at 
bribery when it is on liis own side. But there is a 
painful excess of sound judgment about him. He gets 
into prison, not for leading a mob, but for trying to 
divert them from plunder by actions which are mis- 
understood. He is ver}^ inferior to Alton Locke, who 
gets into prison for a similar performance. The im- 
pet^iosity and vehemence only comes out in his rude- 
ness to Esther and plain speaking to lier adopted 
father ; and in trying to make him an ideal of wisdom, 
George Eliot only succeeds in making him unfit for 
his part. 

If, therefore, we are to accept the indication given 
by the title, and suppose that Felix Holt is to be the 
focus of interest, the novel, I think, fails of its effect. 
We no more see the rough, thorough-going radical, 
stung to fury by pauperism and the slaver}^ of children 
in factories, and sharing the zeal and the illusions of 
Jacobins, than we saw the true spirit of the Renaissance 
in Romola. Mr. Felix Holt would have been quite in 
his place at Toynbee Hall ; but is much too cold-blooded 
for the time when revolution and confiscation were 
really in the air. Perhaps this indicates the want of 
masculine fibre in George Eliot and the deficient sym- 
pathy with rough popular passions which makes us 
feel that he represents the afterthought of the judicious 
sociologist and not the man of flesh and blood who was 
the product of the actual conditions. An3'how, the 
novel appears to be regarded as her least interesting. 
There are undoubtedly many charming scenes. One 
would be disposed to think that Rufus Lyon, the old 
dissenting minister, was more of a contemporary of 



156 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

Baxter than could have been possible at the time ; bnt 
one cannot say confidently what survivals of the type 
there may have been at Coventry, and his simplicity 
and pedantry and power of emphasising the highest 
elements in the creed of his sect show the art of a 
skilled humorist. Esther, too, with her naive apprecia- 
tion of the charms of a luxurious life, is too good for 
Felix. But the really strongest part of the novel is 
old Mrs. Transome, brooding over her sorrows, and 
dwelling remorsefully upon her error in the past. 
" If she had only been more haggard and less majestic, 
those who had glimpses of her outward life might 
have said that she was a griping harridan with a 
tongue like a razor. No one said exactly that; but 
they never said anything like the full truth about her, 
or divined what was hidden under her outward life 
— a woman's keen sensibility and dread, which lay 
screened behind all her petty habits and narrow 
notions as some quivering thing with eyes and throb- 
bing heart may lie crouching behind withered rubbish. 
The sensibility and. dread had palpitated all the faster 
in the prospect of her son's return ; and now that she 
had seen him, she said to herself in her bitter way, 
' It is a lucky cub that escapes skinning. The best 
happiness I shall ever know will be to escape the worst 
misery.' " That is one of the striking passages in 
which George Eliot shows her vivid insight into 
certain moods and characters. Mrs. Transome, I con- 
fess, interests me so much that I should have liked to 
know a little more about that early intrigue which has 
soured her, and how she came to be fascinated by the 
old lover, who by the time at which the book opens 
has shown his inferior nature and uses the old memories 



X.] FELIX HOLT 157 

to insult her. I could willingly have spared, in order 
to make room for a little more of the family scandal, 
some of the elaborate legal complications, and of 
Mr. Felix Holt's clumsy performances as a prophet 
of social reform. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE SPANISH GYPSY 

Felix Holt, as we have seen, had been taken up at a 
time when she was in despair of finishing a drama 
which Lewes for once did not altogether approve. 
She had written three or four acts, and on reading the 
oki work again " found it impossible to abandon it." 
The conceptions moved her deeply, and had ''never 
been wrought out before." Still it required entire 
recasting. Some of her views at the time are given 
in an interesting letter to Mr. Frederic Harrison 
(15th August 186G). He had, it seems, proposed some 
theme for her consideration. " That," she says, " is a 
tremendously difficult problem which you have laid 
before me ; and I think you see its difficulties, though 
they can hardly press on you as they do on me, who 
have gone through again and again the severe effort of 
trying to make certain ideas thoroughly incarnate, as 
if they had revealed themselves to me just in the flesh, 
and not in the spirit. I think aesthetic teaching is the 
highest of all teaching, because it deals with life in 
its highest complexity ; but if it ceases to be purely 
aesthetic, if it lapses anywhere from the picture to the 
diagram, it becomes the most offensive of all teaching." 
She proceeds to point out the " agonising labour to an 
English-fed imagination to make out a sufficiently real 

158 



CHAP. XI.] THE SPANISH GYPSY ln9 

background for the desired picture — to get breathing 
individual forms and group them in the needful rela- 
tions, so that the presentation will lay hold on the 
emotions as human experience — will, as you say, 
' flash ' conviction on the world by means of aroused 
sympathy." She recalls the " unspeakable pains " 
involved in the preparation of Romola and the acquisi- 
tion of the necessary Italian " idiom." The problem 
suggested by Mr. Harrison — its precise nature is not 
told — would, she thinks, be one of "tenfold arduous- 
ness." The statement shows George Eliot's perception 
of the real difficulty. " Ideas " may be seen " in the 
flesh " or " in the spirit " : that is, I take it, as the 
abstract formulae of philosophy or as the concrete 
visions of poetry. The question is whether the writer 
who starts from the abstract can by industrious study 
so incarnate his ideas that they may be as vivid and 
real as if he had started from the opposite point of 
view. "Enough ! " one is induced to say, as Rasselas 
says to Imlac, " thou hast convinced me that no human 
being" (and no philosopher) "can ever be a poet." 
No deliberate absorption of imagery can ever make 
up for the direct spontaneous intuition, and a task 
which involves " agonising labour " is likely enough 
to result in painful reading. Why undertake it ? 
. George Eliot, however, thought differently, and 
attempted to achieve this difficult task in the Spanish 
Gypsy. She is soon " swimming in Spanish history 
and literature," and on 15th October ]866 begins the 
recasting. Early in 1867 she visited Spain to get up 
the local colouring, and after many changes the poem 
was at last finished on 29th April 18G8. Lewes was 
in an "unprecedented state of delight," and especially 



160 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

pleased with the " variety " of the work, because he 
had persuaded her to put it aside " on the ground of 
monotony." The book, though the sale was consider- 
able, roused some hostile criticism at the time, and 
has not convinced even her warmest admirers that she 
was in her proper place as a poet. She left a note 
upon its history which is interesting, as giving her own 
defence against the obvious reasons for dissatisfaction, 
and as illustrating her general position. The subject, 
it seems, was originally suggested by a picture of the 
Annunciation, ascribed to Titian in the Scuola di san 
Kocco at Venice. It embodied, she thought, a " great 
dramatic motive." A maiden, "full of young hope," 
and about to share in the ordinary lot of womanhood, 
is suddenly made aware that she is to fulfil a great 
destiny, and to have a terribly different experience. 
" Here," she thought, "is a subject grander than that 
of Iphigenia, and it has never been used." She 
then tried to find an appropriate embodiment, and 
could think of nothing except the moment of Spanish 
history when the struggle with the Moors was attain- 
ing its climax. She could not make i;se of Moors 
and Jews, because the "facts of their history were 
too conspicuously opposed to the working out of 
my catastrophe." Facts have that awkward habit. 
She thought, however (though the point is surely 
doubtful), that this objection did not apply to the 
Gypsies. The subject, as she meditated, became 
"more and more pregnant." It might be " a symbol 
of the part which is played by hereditary conditions 
in the largest sense, and of the fact that what we 
call duty is entirely made up of such conditions." 
Tragedy consists in the "terrible difficulty of adjust- 



XI.] THE SPANISH GYPSY 161 

ing our individual needs to the dire necessity of our 
lot," in which, of course, the lives of our fellow- 
creatures are involved. The great Greek tragedies 
often turn upon such a conflict between the inherited 
Nemesis and the individual whom it crushes. Othello 
becomes a " most pathetic tragedy " instead of a simple 
story of jealousy, on account " of the hereditary con- 
ditions of Othello's lot" — a point surely not much 
considered by Shakespeare. We may grant, how- 
ever, that a tragedy may thus show the individual 
giving way to the general. It cannot explain why 
the conflict should arise, but it sets forth the pathetic 
consequences. In the Sjyanish Gypsy the action repre- 
sents the loving and sympathetic instincts which are 
converted into "piety, i.e. loving, willing submission 
and heroic Promethean effort towards high possi- 
bilities." Certain remarks upon ethical doctrines are 
apparently meant to show that such instincts cannot 
be governed by " rational reflection," and therefore 
may at once arouse sympathy and lead to terrible 
scrapes. There are, however, two " consolatory 
elements " woven into the very warp of the poem : 
" (1) The importance of individual deeds ; (2) the 
all-sufficiency of the soul's passions in determining 
sympathetic action." I mention these elements, as 
George Eliot attaches so much importance to them, 
though I confess that they do not much console me. 
One other remark is noteworthy. It might, she says, 
be "a reasonable ground of objection against the 
whole structure of the Sjxinish Gypsy if it were shown 
that the action is outrageously impossible — lying out- 
side all that can be congruously conceived of human 
actions. It is not a reasonable ground of objection 



162 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

that tliey would have done better to act otherwise, any 
more than it is a reasonable objection against the 
Ip1ugei\ia that Agamemnon would have done better not 
to sacrifice his daughter." 

It is plain that if the Spanish Gypsy failed to succeed, 
it was not for want of careful consideration of ajsthetic 
principles. Moreover, without following this excursion 
into theories, we may, I think, take one result for 
granted. IJndoubtedl}^, the conflict between " the in- 
dividual " and " the general," or, say, between the 
duties which a human being owes to his own friends 
and family, and those which he owes to his country or 
his gods, may be an admirable theme for tragedy. 
Fedalma, George Eliot's heroine, is distracted between 
her love for her destined bridegroom and her sense of 
duty to the race from which she sprang. Nobody will 
deny that such a struggle presents an interesting and 
worthy theme. The difficulty comes afterwards. Wliy 
did George Eliot suppose that the onl}^ fitting historical 
embodiment Avas at " a particular period of Spanish 
history " ? This seems to involve a singular leap 
in the logic. It is especially noticeable in a writer 
who has insisted that the highest motives may be 
found under commonplace outsides ; that country 
parsons and farmers may have the " root of the 
matter " in them ; and that even the passions Avhich 
inspired the Greek tragedies may be sliown at work in 
the breast of an eight years' old girl. " Heredity " has 
been annexed of late years by " realistic " novelists ; 
but, in any case, the struggle between loyalty to our 
race or family instincts, and the wider forces of 
evolution, might be illustrated from transactions less 
obscure than the struggle in the Spain of the fifteenth 



XI.] THE SPANISH GYPSY 163 

century. A hopeful young English maiden of the 
nineteenth may be called upon to choose between 
making a respectable marriage and devoting herself to 
some impracticable ideal with tragical, if perhaps also 
comic, results. Why place the heroine among con- 
ditions so hard to imagine ? 

One consequence of George Eliot's choice of this 
romantic setting for her characters is obvious. In 
romance we have to take leave of common sense. 
That is an easy sacrifice to make on some occasions. 
Children, even grown-up children, may delight in fairy 
tales and the Arabian Nights, though they get into a 
region where the impossible is the order of the day 
and morality ceases to be binding. Poetically-minded 
people can still take some pleasure, I believe, in the 
old romances, and find in Spenser's Faerie Queene not 
only a delightful series of pictures, but poetry informed 
with a lofty spirit of chivalry. But in the Spanish 
Gy2)sy we cannot get so far from downright historical 
fact. Our ethical sentiment is to be seriously in- 
terested, and conviction is to be " flashed " upon us by 
aroused sympathy. Now, to sympathise to any purpose 
we must understand. We must be able to appreciate 
the difficulty of the position and the severity of the 
ordeal. Here, however, we are terribly at a loss. The 
critical scene of the Spanish Gypsy is the first inter- 
view between Fedalma and Zarca. Fedalma has been 
brought up from her earliest infancy as a Catholic and 
a Spaniard. She has only seen the gypsies as a band 
of prisoners brought through the town in chains. She 
is on the eve of marriage to a typical Spanish noble, 
with whom she is passionately in love. To her enters 
abruptly one of the gypsies. He explains without loss 



164 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

of time that he is her father ; tliat he is about to be the 
Moses or Mahomet of a gypsy nation in Africa; and 
orders her to give up her country, her religion, and 
her lover to join him in this hopeful enterprise. She 
is, of course, a good deal put out, and explains some 
obvious objections; but after exchanging some para- 
graphs of blank verse, she walks off with her parent, 
leaving a short note to inform her lover that she can 
have nothing more to do with him. Admit the least 
touch of common sense, and the situation is surely, in 
George Eliot's words, " outrageously impossible." We 
know enough of the gypsies of history to perceive that 
Zarca behaved like a lunatic. We may try to escape 
by dropping history and regarding " Spain," like 
Shakespeare's Bohemia, as a phrase belonging to 
the geography of simple romance. But, then, the 
whole story becomes too unreal to appeal to our 
sympathies. We are able to accept the position of 
Ipliigenia, to which George Eliot appeals, as treated by 
Euripides, or even by Racine, and for the moment 
take for granted that the human sacrifice is a reasona- 
ble mode of condiict. That assumption once made, the 
position becomes clear. The father is bound to kill 
the daughter, because, as we know, the gods will be 
pleased. But the difficulty of the Spanish Gypsy is 
that if we try, as George Eliot tried, to imagine 
the actual state of things, the dilemma is absurd; 
and if we substitute a world of pure fancy, every- 
thing becomes arbitrary. We do not see why 
the daughter is bound to act like a lunatic. She 
informs us, of course, that she is deeply aifected, but 
we cannot perceive that her motives are reasonable 
and intelligible. Considered from the ethical side. 



XI.] THE SPANISH GYFSY 165 

the objection seems to be fatal. Dr. Congreve, an 
adequate authority, said that it was a " mass of 
positivism." The meaning, if an outsider may venture 
a guess, seems to be tliat tlie positivist insists upon a 
view of duty as corresponding to the vital instincts of 
the " social organism " ; the identification of the in- 
dividual with the body of which he is the product, and 
the constituent and consequent readiness to sacrifice 
life and happiness to the interest of the community 
into which he is born. This doctrine was already 
preached, though in an imperfect form, by Savonarola to 
Roniola, and becomes prominent in the Si)anish Gypsy. 
Now one may accept the principle as true and valuable, 
and yet regard the story as a reductio ad absurdiim of 
some applications. Fedalma, in her first interview with 
Zarca, exclaims — 

" Father, my soul is not too base to ring 
• At touch of your great thoughts ; nay, in my blood 

There streams the sense unspeakable of kind, 
As leopard feels at ease with leopard." 

The human being should have higher instincts than 
the leopard. Fedalma, however, is gradually led to 
admit the supreme force of this appeal. She will not 
be '' half-hearted." 

"I will seek nothing but to shun base joy. 
The saints were cowards who stood by to see 
Christ crucified : they should have flung themselves 
Upon the Roman spears, and died in vain — 
The grandest death, to die in vain — for love, 
Greater than sways the forces of the world ! 
That death shall be my bridegroom. I will wed 
The curse that blights my people." 

Of course, the young lady is excited. She is in the 
state of mind in which irrationality is a recommenda- 



166 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

tion. Death surely is made grand by the grandeur of 
the purpose, not by the futility of the means. Surely 
the death of the early Christians and their master 
would not be grander if we held that their zeal was 
wasted on an ideal as absurd as Fedalma's. Her 
doctrine, stated in cold blood, seems to be that our 
principles are to be determined by the physical fact 
of ancestry. The discovery that my father was a 
Saxon or a Celt might perhaps be allowed to affect 
my sympathies, but surely should not change my views 
of home-rule. In an interval of common sense Fedalma 
suggests that she will marry and persuade her husband 
to protect the gypsies. Nobody could object to that ; 
but to throw overboard all other ties on the simple 
ground of descent, and adopt the most preposterous 
schemes of the vagabonds to whom you are related, 
seems to be very bad morality whatever may be its 
affinity to positivism. 

The error seems to be precisely that George Eliot 
was hopelessly trammelled by the conditions which 
she had accepted. She could not get her abstract 
principle to become " incarnate " in facts. She falls 
into a hopeless entanglement. The facts become 
absurd, and the principle has to be distorted. It may 
still be asked whether, in spite of such views, the 
Spanish Gypsy is not a great poem. Paradise Lost is a 
masterpiece poetically, though its theology is grotesque 
and its proposed justification of Providence an admitted 
failure. Can we say anything of the kind on behalf of 
the Spanish Gypsy ? It may clearly be said that it 
certainly shows a powerful intellect stored with noble 
sentiment and impelled to utter great thoughts. It 
illustrates curiously the union observed by Lewes of 



XI.] THE SPANISH C4YPSY 167 

great diffidence with great ambition. She aims at 
the highest mark, thougli at any given moment she 
is despondent of achievement. She adopted the title 
of the poem, she says, because it recalled the old 
dramatists, with whom she thought she had " more 
cousinship than with recent poets." ^ It seems to have 
been first written in the dramatic form ; though, as 
finished, it became a set of scenes interspersed with 
digressions into epic poetry. The passages which 
would be represented in the regular drama by stage 
directions are expanded into descriptive writing or 
into psychological dis(iuisitions intended to introduce 
us to the characters. The old dramatists, to Avhom 
she refers, might give a precedent for introducing a 
good many sententious remarks upon human life 
which have no very direct relation to the story ; 
but, in truth, she reminds us rather of " Philip van 
Artevelde " and other modern plays not intended for 
the stage ; and if we complain that the book tried by 
dramatic tests becomes languid, it may be replied that 
we have had fair notice that it belongs to a different 
genus and should be judged from the author's point 
of view. This, however, does not answer the ordinary 
objection that, after all, it is not poetry ; or does not 
decisively cross the indefinable but essential line which 
divides true poetry from the highest rhetoric. Here 
and there is a fine phrase, as in the opening-passage 
about — 

"Broad-breasted Spain, leaning with equal love 
On the Mid Sea that moans with memories, 
And on the untravelled Ocean's restless tides." 

i Middletou's Spanish Gipsie was acted about 1621. 



168 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

Or a few lines later — 

" What times are little ? To the sentinel 
That hour is regal when he mounts on guard," 

Passages often sound exactly like poetry ; and yet, 
even her admirers admit that they seldom, if ever, have 
the genuine ring. They do not satisfy the old criterion 
that nothing can be poetry, in the full sense, of which 
we are disposed to say that it would be as good in 
prose. The lyrics which are interspersed are palpable 
if clever imitations of the genuine thing. Perhaps it 
was simply that George Eliot had not one essential 
gift — the exquisite sense for the value of words which 
may transmute even common thought into poetry. 
Even her prose, indeed, though often admirable, some- 
times becomes heavy, and gives the impression ^that 
instead of finding the right word she is accumulating 
more or less complicated approximations. Then one 
might inquire whether, after all, the problem of "in- 
carnating " the abstract idea, if not really impracticable 
from the beginning, was suited to her powers. The 
dramatic form especially demands the intuitive instead 
of the discursive attitude of mind, and the vivid 
''presentation" of concrete men and women instead 
of the thoughtful analysis of their character. Might 
she not succeed by accepting the conditions frankly, 
and attempting, in spite of its bad name, an avowedly 
" philosophical form " ? She loved Wordsworth well 
enough to forgive his admitted shortcomings ; and 
if the Excursion is undeniably dull, it is still a work 
which, in spite of all critical condemnations, has j^ro- 
foundly impressed the spiritual development of many 
eminent persons. 



XI.] THE SPANISH GYPSY 169 

George Eliot was in fact led to try various poetical 
experiments. A volume of poems published in 1874 
contained the " Legend of Jubal," begun in 1869, 
" How Lisa loved the King " (from Boccaccio), 
" Agatha," " Armgart," and " A College Breakfast 
Party," which were written in the same period. 
That they all show great literary ability is unde- 
niable, though it is still doubtful whether they show 
more. The ''College Breakfast," with its down- 
right plunge into metaphysics, set forth with an 
abundant display of metaphor and illustration, is a 
singular exhibition of (as I must think) misapplied 
ingenuity ; and chiefly interesting to people who 
may wish to know George Eliot's judgment of Hegeli- 
anism, sestheticism, and positivism. The most remark- 
able, however, is the short poem called " may I join 
the choir invisible." It has been accepted by many 
who sympathise with her religious views. The in- 
visible choir is formed of those " immortal dead who 
live again in minds made better by their presence. " 
So to live, we are told, "is heaven." The generous 
natures have set their example before us, and our 
" rarer, better, truer self " finds in them a help to 
harmonise discordant impulses, and seek a loftier 
ideal. 

" The better self shall live till human Time 
Shall fold its eyelids, and the human sky 
Be gathered like a scroll within the tomb 
Unread for ever. 

This is life to come 
Which martyred men have made more glorious 
For us who strive to follow. May I reach 
That purest heaven, be to other souls 
The cup of strength in some great agony, 



170 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

Enkindle generous ardour, feed pure love, 
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty — 
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, 
And in diffusion ever more intense. 
, So shall I join the choir invisible 
■ Whose music is the gladness of the world." 



To appreciate the sacred poetry of any church, 
one ought to be an orthodox member ; and, to many 
people, of course, immortality thus understood seems 
to be rather a mockery. It would be better, they 
think, to admit frankly that immortality is a figment. 
Even they may agree that the aspiration is lofty and 
eloquently expressed. Reflections upon a similar 
theme inspire two other poems. Armgart is a prima 
donna, rejoicing in the overpowering success of her 
first appearance, who suddenly loses her voice by a 
sudden attack of throat disease ; and has to reconcile 
herself to the abandonment of her hopes, and to 
becoming part of the choir inaudible. " Jubal " — 
which seems to me to be the nearest approach to 
genuine poetry — is the story of the patriarch wdio 
invented music. He leaves his tribe for a journey 
which, as he has the prediluvian longevity, is pro- 
tracted for an indefinite time, and -when he returns 
finds that people have got out of the habit of living 
for centuries. The descendants of his contemporaries 
are celebrating a feast in honour of the inventor of 
music ; and, when he innocently observes that he is 
the person in question, he is pooh-poohed without 
further inquiry. As he lies downi to die his Past 
appears to him, and explains that he should be 
content with having bestowed the great gift upon 
mankind. 



XI.] THE SPANISH GYPSY 171 

" Thy limbs shall lie dark, tombless on the sod, 
Because thou shinest in man's soul, a God, 
Who found and gave new passion and new joy 
That nought but earth's destruction can destroy." 

The excellent R. H. Hutton was offended by the 
doctrine of this poem, especially by the apparent 
implication that death is, on the whole, a good thing, 
because it induced a race, which had taken things too 
easily as long as they fancied that they had an in- 
definite time before them, to rouse themselves and 
invent musical as well as other instruments. The 
logic indeed — if really intended — does not appear to 
be very cogent. The moral that, as we have got to die, 
we should be content with the consciousness of having 
played our part, without expecting reward or bothering 
ourselves about posthumous fame, is more to the pur- 
pose. Jubal, who happily lived in a purely legend- 
ary region, does not come into conflict with historical 
facts like Fedalma, and may be taken as a satisfactory 
poetical symbol of a characteristic mood, suggested by 
the old thought of mortality and oblivion. I cannot, 
indeed, believe that George Eliot achieved a per- 
manent position in English poetry : she is a remark- 
able, I suppose unique, case, of a writer taking to 
poetry at the ripe age of forty-four, by which the 
majority of poets have done their best work. Perhaps 
that suggests that the impulse was acquired rather 
than innate, and more likely to succeed in impressing 
reflective and melancholy minds than in vivid pre- 
sentation of concrete images. 



CHAPTER XII 

MIDDLEMARCH 

The poetic impulse seems to have decayed soon after 
the Spanish Gypsy, as George Eliot gradually became 
absorbed in another novel. On 1st January 1869 she 
notes that she has projected a novel, to be called Middle- 
march, besides a " long poem on Timoleon,'* of which we 
hear nothing more. Middlemarch at first made slow pro- 
gress. She began the '' Vincy and Featherstone parts " 
in August. It is not till December 1870 that she is 
beginning a story to be called " Miss Brooke," without 
any very serious intention '^ of carrying it out lengthily." 
It became amalgamated with the other story. George 
Eliot appears to have suffered even more than usual 
from ill-health and despondency during the composi- 
tion, and was troubled at times by the difficulty of 
bringing a superabundant variety of motives into 
artistic unity. The book was published on a new plan, 
coming out in eight parts — the first on 1st December 
1871, and the last in December 1872. Middlemarch, 
she says, was received with as much enthusiasm as 
any of her former books, not even excepting Adam 
Bede. Its commercial success is proved by the fact 
that she made more by it than by Romola. Nearly 
25,000 copies had been sold before the end of 1875. 
George Eliot was now admittedly the first living 

172 



CHAP. XII.] MIDDLEMARCH 173 

novelist. Thackeray and Dickens were both dead, 
and no survivor of her generation could be counted 
as a rival. When a writer's fame is once established, 
the reception of his books is apt to be disproportion- 
ately favourable. They are read not only by genuine 
admirers, but by all who know that they ought to 
admire. The immediate success of Middlemarch may 
have been proportioned rather to the author's reputa- 
tioi» than to its intrinsic merits. It certainly lacks 
the peculiar charm of the early work, and one under- 
stands why the Spectator should have been led to say 
that George Eliot was "the most melancholy of 
authors." The conclusion was apparently softened to 
meet this objection. There is not much downright 
tragedy, but the general impression is unmistakably 
sad. This, however, does not prevent Middlemarch 
from having, in some ways, even a stronger interest 
than its companions. George Eliot was now over 
fifty, and the book represents the general tone of her 
reflection upon life and human nature. By that age 
most people have had some rather unpleasant aspects 
of life pretty strongly forced upon their attention ; and 
George Eliot, though she made it a principle to take 
things cheerfully, had never had much of the buoyancy 
which generates optimism. She was not, she used to 
say, either an optimist or a pessimist, but a "meliorist," 
— a believer that the world could be improved, and was 
perhaps slowly improving, though with a very strong 
conviction that the obstacles were enormous and the 
immediate outlook not specially bright. Some people, 
it seems, attributed her sadness to her creed, though I 
fancy that, in such matters, creed has much less to do 
with the matter than temperament. So sensitive a 



174 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

woman, working so conscientiously and with so many 
misgivings, could hardly make her imaginary world a 
cheerful place of residence. Middlemarch is primarily 
a portrait of the circles which had been most familiar 
to her in youth, and its second title is " a study of 
provincial life." Provincial life, however, is to ex- 
emplify the results of a wider survey of contemporary 
society. One peculiarity of the book is appropriate 
to this scheme. It is not a story, but a combination 
of at least three stories — the love affairs of Dorothea 
and Casaubon, of Rosamond Vincy and Lydgate, and 
of Mary Garth and Fred Vincy, which again are inter- 
woven with the story of Bulstrode. The various 
actions get mixed together as they would naturally 
do in a country town. Modern English novelists 
seem to have made up their mind that this kind of 
mixture is contrary to the rules of art. I am content 
to say that I used to find some old novels written on 
that plan very interesting. It is tiresome, of course, 
if a reader is to think only of the development of the 
plot. But when the purpose is to get a general picture 
of the manners and customs of a certain social stratum, 
and we are to be interested in all the complex play of 
character and the opinions of neighbours, the method 
is appropriate to the design. The individuals are 
shown as involved in the network of. surrounding 
interests which affects their development. Middle- 
march gives us George Eliot's most characteristic view 
of such matters. It is her answer to the question, 
What on the whole is your judgment of commonplace 
English life ? for '' provincialism " is not really confined 
to the provinces. Without trying to put the answer 
into a single formula, and it would be very unjust to 



XII.] MIDDLEMAECH 175 

her to assume that such a formula was intended, I 
may note one leading doctrine : — 

" An eminent philosopher among my friends," she 
sa,ys, with a characteristically scientific illustration, 
'' who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting 
it into the serene light of science, has shown me this 
pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass, an extensive sur- 
face of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, 
will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all 
directions ; but place now against it a lighted candle as 
a centre of illumination, and the scratches will seem to 
arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles 
round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the 
scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is 
only your candle which produces the flattering illusion 
of a concentric arrangement, its light falling into an 
exclusive optical selection. These things are a par- 
able" — showing the effect of egoism. It may also 
represent the effect of a novelist's mental preoccupa- 
tion. Many different views of human society may 
be equally true to fact; but the writer, who has a 
particular " candle," in the shape of a favourite prin- 
ciple, produces a spontaneous unity by its application 
to the varying cases presented. The personages who 
carry out the various plots of Middlemarcli may be, as 
I think they are, very lifelike portraits of real life, but 
they are seen from a particular point of view. The 
"prelude" gives the keynote. We are asked to re- 
member the childish adventure of Saint Theresa 
setting out to seek martyrdom in the country of the 
Moors. Her " passionate, ideal nature demanded an 
epic life . . . some object which would reconcile 
self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life 



176 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

beyond self. . . . She ultimately found her epos in 
the reform of a religious order." There are later-born 
Theresas, who had "no epic life with a constant 
unfolding of far-resonant action." They have had to 
work amid " dim lights and tangled circumstances " ; 
they have been "helped by no coherent social faith 
and ardour which could perform the function of 
knowledge for the ardently thrilling soul." They 
have blundered accordingly ; but " here and there is 
born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose 
loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained good- 
ness tremble off, and are dispersed among hindrances, 
instead of centring on some long recognisable deed." 
We are to see how such a nature manifests itself — no 
longer in the remote regions of arbitrary fancy, but in 
the commonplace atmosphere of a modern English 
town. In Maggie Tulliver and in Felix Holt we have 
already had the struggle for an ideal ; but in Middle- 
march there is a fuller picture of the element of 
stupidity and insensibility which is apt to clog the 
wings of aspiration. The Dodsons, among whom 
Maggie is placed, belong to the stratum of sheer 
bovine indifference. They are not only without 
ideas, but it has never occurred to them that such 
things exist. In Middlemarcli we consider the higher 
stratum, which reads newspapers and supports the 
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and 
whose notions constitute what is called enlightened 
public opinion. The typical representative of what it 
calls its mind is Mr. Brooke, who can talk about Sir 
Humphry Davy, and Wordsworth, and Italian art, 
and has a delightful facility in handling the small 
change of conversation which has ceased to possess 



XII,] ^HDDLEMARCH 177 

any intrinsic value. Even his neighbours can see that 
he is a fatuous humbug, and do not care to veil their 
blunt common sense by fine phrases. But he discharges 
the functions of the Greek chorus with a boundless 
supply of the platitudes which represent an indistinct 
foreboding of the existence of an intellectual world. 

Dorothea, brought up with Mr. Brooke in place of 
a parent, is to be a Theresa struggling under " dim 
lights and entangled circumstances." She is related, 
of course, both to Maggie and to Eomola, though she 
is not in danger of absolute asphyxiation in a dense 
bucolic atmosphere, or of martyrdom in the violent 
struggles of hostile creeds. Her danger is rather that 
of being too easily acclimatised in a comfortable state 
of things, where there is sufficient cultivation and no 
particular demand for St. Theresas. She attracts us by 
her perfect straightforwardness and simplicity, though 
we are afraid that she has even a slight touch of 
stupidity. We fancy that she might find satisfaction, 
like other young ladies, in looking after schools and 
the unhealthy cottages on her uncle's estate. Still, 
she has a real loftiness of character, and a disposition 
to take things seriously, which make her more or less 
sensible of the limitations of her circle. She has 
vague religious aspirations, looks down upon the 
excellent country gentleman. Sir James Chettam, and 
fancies that she would like to marry the judicious 
Hooker, or Milton in his blindness. We can under- 
stand, and even pardon her, when she takes the pedant 
Casaubon at his own valuation, and sees in him " a 
living Bossuet, whose work would reconcile complete 
knowledge with devote.d piety, a modern Augustine 
who united the aiories of doctor and saint." 



178 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

Dorothea's misguided adoration is, I think, very- 
natural, but it is undeniably painful, and many readers 
protested. The point is curious. George Eliot de- 
clared that she had lived in much sympathy with 
Casaubou's life, and was especially gratified when 
some one saw the pathos of his career. No doubt there 
is a pathos in devotion to an entirely mistaken ideal. 
To spend a life in researches, all thrown away from 
ignorance of what has been done, is a melancholy fate. 
One secret of Casaubon's blunder was explained to his 
wife during the honeymoon. He had not — as Ladis- 
law pointed out — read the Germans, and was therefore 
groping through a wood with a pocket compass where 
they had made carriage roads. But suppose that he 
had read the last authorities ? Would that have really 
mended matters ? A deeper objection is visible even 
to his own circle. Solid Sir James Chettam remarks 
that he is a man "with no good red blood in his 
body," and Ladislaw curses him for •'' a cursed white- 
blooded pedantic coxcomb." Their judgment is con- 
firmed by all that we hear of him. He marries, we 
are told, because he wauts " female tendance for his 
declining years. Hence he determined to abandon 
himself to the stream of feeling, and perhaps was 
surprised to find what an exceedingly shallow rill it 
was." His petty jealousy and steady snubbing of his 
wife is all in character. Now we can pity a man for 
making a blunder, and perhaps, in some sense, we 
ought to " pity " him for having neither heart nor 
passion. But that is a kind of pity which is not akin 
to love. Dorothea's mistake was not that she married 
a man who had not read German, but that she mar- 
ried a stick instead of a man. The story, the more 



XII.] MIDDLEMARCH ' 179 

fully we accept its truthfulness, becomes the more of 
a satire against young ladies who aim at lofty ideals. 
It implies a capacity for being imposed upon by a 
mere outside shell of pretence. Then we have to ask 
whether things are made better by her subsequent 
marriage to Ladislaw ? That equally offended some 
readers, as George Eliot complained. Ladislaw is 
almost obtrusively a favourite with his creator. He is 
called *' Will " for the sake of endearment ; and we 
are to understand him as so charming that Dorothea's 
ability to keep him at a distance gives the most striking 
proof of her strong sense of wifely duty. Yet Ladis- 
law is scarcely more attractive to most masculine read- 
ers than the dandified Stephen Guest. He is a dabbler 
in art and literature ; a small journalist, ready to 
accept employment from silly Mr. Brooke, and ap- 
parently liking to lie on a rug in the houses of his 
friends and flirt with their pretty wives. He certainly 
shows indifference to money, and behaves himself 
correctly to Dorothea, though he has fallen in love 
with her on her honeymoon. He is no doubt an 
amiable Bohemian, for some of whose peculiarities 
it would be easy to suggest a living original, and 
we can believe that Dorothea was quite content with 
her lot. But that seems to imply that a Theresa 
of our days has to be content with suckling fools and 
chronicling small beer. We are told, indeed, that 
Ladislaw became a reformer — apparently a " philo- 
sophical radical " — and even had the good luck to be 
returned by a constituency who paid his expenses. 
George Eliot ought to know ; but I cannot believe in 
this conclusion. Ladislaw, I am convinced, became 
a brilliant journalist who could write smartly about 



180 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

everything, but who had not the moral force to be a 
leader in thought or action. I should be the last 
person to deny that a journalist may lead an honour- 
able and useful life, but I cannot think the profession 
congenial to a lofty devotion to ideals. Dorothea was 
content with giving him " wifely help " ; asking his 
friends to dinner, one supposes, and copying his ill- 
written manuscripts. Many lamented that " so rare a 
creature should be absorbed into the life of another," 
though no one could point out exactly what she ought 
to have done. That is just the pity of it. There was 
nothing for her to do ; and I can only comfort myself 
by reflecting that, after all, she had a dash of stupid- 
ity, and that more successful Theresas may do a 
good deal of mischief. 

The next pair of lovers gives a less ambiguous 
moral. Lydgate, we are told, though we scarcely see 
it, was a man of great energy, with a high purpose. 
His ideal is shown by his ambition to be a leader in 
medical science. In contrast to Casaubon, he is 
thoroughly familiar with the latest authorities, and has 
a capacity for really falling in love. Unfortunately, 
Rosamond Vincy is a model of one of the forms of 
stupidity against which the gods fight in vain. Being 
utterly incapable of even understanding her husband's 
aspirations, fixing her mind on the vulgar kind of 
success, and having the strength of will which com.es 
from an absolute limitation to one aim, she is a most 
effective torpedo, and paralyses all Lydgate's energies. 
He is entangled in money difficulties ; gives up his 
aspirations ; sinks into a merely popular physician, 
and is sentenced to die early of diphtheria. A really 
strong man, such as Lydgate is supposed to be, might 



XII.] MIDDLE MARCH 181 

perhaps have made a better fight against the tempta- 
tion and escaped tliat sLavery to a pretty woman which 
seems to have impressed George Eliot as the great 
danger to ■ the other sex. But she never, I think, 
showed more power than in this painful history. The 
skill with which Lydgate's gradual abandonment of 
his lofty aims is worked out without making him 
simply contemptible, forces us to recognise the 
truthfulness of the conception. It is an inimitable 
study of such a fascination as the snake is supposed to 
exert upon the bird : the slow reluctant surrender, step 
by step, of the higher to the lower nature, in conse- 
quence of weakness which is at least perfectly intel- 
ligible. George Eliot's " psychological analysis " is 
here at its best; if it is not surpassed by the power 
shown in Bulstrode. Bulstrode, too, has an ideal of a 
kind ; only it is the vulgar ideal which is suggested by 
a low form of religion. George Eliot shows the ugly 
side of the beliefs in which she had more frequently 
emphasised the purer elements. But she still judges 
without bitterness; and gives, perhaps, the most satis- 
factory portrait of the hypocrisy which is more often 
treated by the method of savage caricature. If he is 
not as amusing as a Tartuffe or a Pecksniff, he is 
marvellously lifelike. Nothing can be finer than the 
description of the curious blending of motives and the 
ingenious self-deception which enables Bulstrode to 
maintain his own self-respect. He is afraid of ex- 
posure by the scamp who has known his past history. 
" At six o'clock he had already been long dressed, and 
had spent some of his wretchedness in prayer, pleading 
his motives for averting the worst evil if in anything 
he had used falsity and spoken what was not true 



182 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

before God. For Bulstrode shrank from a direct lie 
with an intensity disproportionate to the number of 
his direct misdeeds. But many of those misdeeds 
were like the subtle muscular movements which are 
not taken account of in the consciousness, though they 
bring about the end that we fix our mind on and 
desire. And it is only what we are naively conscious 
of that we can vividly imagine to be seen by Omni- 
science." The culminating scene in which Bulstrode 
comes to the edge of murder, and, though he does not 
kill his enemy, refrains from officiously saving life, is 
the practical application of the principles ; and one is 
half inclined to think that there was some excuse for 
the proceeding. 

It is, I think, to the force and penetration shown in 
such passages that Middlemarcli owes its impressive- 
ness. It shows George Eliot's reflective powers fully 
ripened and manifesting singular insight into certain 
intricacies of motive and character. There is, indeed, 
a correlative loss of the early power of attractiveness. 
The remaining pair of lovers, Mary Garth and Fred 
Vincy, the shrewd young woman and the feeble young 
gentleman whom she governs, do not carry us away ; 
and Caleb Garth, though he is partly drawn from the 
same original as Adam Bede, is unimpeachable, but a 
faint duplicate of his predecessor. The moral most 
obviously suggested would apparently be that the 
desirable thing is to do your work well in the position 
to which Providence has assigned you, and not to bother 
about "ideals" at all. II fant cultiver notre jardin. is 
an excellent moral, bat it comes more appropriately at 
the end of Candide than at the end of a story which is 
to give us a modern Theresa. 



XII.] MIDDLEMABCH 183 

This, I think, explains the rather painful impression 
which is made by Middlemarch. It is prompted by a 
sympathy for the enthusiast, but turns out to be 
virtually a satire upon the modern world. The lofty 
nature is to be exhibited struggling against the 
circumambient element of crass stupidity and stolid 
seltishness. But that element comes to represent the 
dominant and overpowering force. Belief is in so 
chaetic a state that the idealist is likely to go astray 
after false lights. Intellectual ambition mistakes 
pedantry for true learning ; religious aspiration tempts 
acquiescence in cant and superstition; the desire to 
carry your creed into practice makes compromise 
necessary, and compromise passes imperceptibly into 
surrender. One is tempted to ask whether this does 
not exaggerate one aspect of the human tragicomedy. 
The unity, to return to our "parable," is to be the 
light carried by the observer in search of an idealist. 
In Middlemarch the light shows the aspirations of the 
serious actors, and measures their excellence by their 
capacity for such a motive. The test so suggested 
seems to give a rather one-sided view of the world. 
The perfect novelist, if such a being existed, looking 
upon human nature from a thoroughly impartial and 
scientific point of view, would agree that such aspira- 
tions are rare and obviously impossible for the great 
mass of mankind. People, indisputably, are '' mostly 
fools," and care very little for theories of life and 
conduct. But, therefore, it is idle to quarrel with the 
inevitable or to be disappointed at its results ; and, 
moreover, it is easy to attach too much imxjortance to 
this particular impulse. The world, somehow or other, 
worries along by means of very commonplace affections 



184 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. xii. 

and very limited outlooks. George Eliot, no doubt, 
fully recognises that fact, but slie seems to be dispirited 
by the contemplation. The result, however, is that 
she seems to be a little out of touch with the actual 
world, and to speak from a position of philosophical 
detachment which somehow exhibits her characters 
in a rather distorting light. For that reason Middle- 
march seems to fall short of the great masterpieces 
which imply a closer contact with the world of reali- 
ties and less preoccupation Avith certain speculative 
doctrines. Yet it is clearly a work of extraordinary 
power, full of subtle and accurate observation ; and 
gives, if a melancholy, yet an undeniably truthful 
portraiture of the impression made by the society of 
the time upon one of the keenest observers, though 
upon an observer looking at the world from a certain 
distance, and rather too much impressed by the im- 
portance of philosophers and theorists. 



CHAPTER XIII 

DANIEL DERONDA 

George Eliot was to write one more novel, and one 
which was intended to give most clearly her message 
to mankind. In June 1874 she is "brewing her 
future big book." In February 1876 the first part 
was published ; it came out in the same form as 
Middlemarch, in eight monthly parts, and had from 
the first a larger sale than its predecessor. Here 
again we have the doctrine of ideals, and expounded 
with even more emphasis. The story is really two 
stories put side by side and intersecting at intervals. 
Each gives a life embodying a principle, and each 
illustrates its opposite by the contrast. Gwendolen 
Harleth, a young lady with aspirations in a latent 
state, is misled into a worldly marriage, and though 
ultimately saved, is saved " as by fire." Daniel Deronda 
is throughout true to his higher nature, and is, in 
George Eliot's works, what Sir Charles Grandison is 
in Richardson's — the type of human perfection. The 
story of Gwendolen's marriage shows undiminished 
power. Here and there, perhaps, we have a little too 
much psychological analysis ; but, after all, the reader 
who objects to psychology can avoid it by skipping a 
paragraph or two. It is another version of the old 
tragic motive : the paralysing influence of unmitigated 

185 



186 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

and concentrated selfishness, already illustrated by 
Tito and Rosamond. Grandcourt, to whom Gwen- 
dolen sacrifices herself, is compared to a crab or a 
boa-constrictor slowly pinching its victim to death : 
to appeal to him for mercy would be as idle as to 
appeal to " a dangerous serpent ornamentally coiled 
on her arm." He is a Tito in a further stage of 
development — with all better feelings atrophied, and 
enabled, by his fortune, to gratify his spite without 
exerting himself in intrigues. Like Tito, he suggests, 
to me at least, rather the cruel woman than the male 
autocrat. Some critic remarked, to George Eliot's an- 
noyance, that the scenes between him and his parasite 
Lush showed the ''imperious feminine, not the mas- 
culine character." She comforted herself by the 
statement that Bernal Osborne — a thorough man of 
the world — had commended these scenes as specially 
lifelike. I can, indeed, accept both views, for the 
distinction is rather too delicate for definite appli- 
cation. One feels, I think, that Grandcourt was 
drawn by a woman ; but a sort of voluptuous enjoy- 
ment of malignant tyranny is unfortunately not con- 
fined to either sex. Anyhow, Gwendolen's ordeal is 
pathetic, and she excites more sympathy than any of 
George Eliot's victims. Perhaps she excites a little 
too much. At least, when she comes very near homi- 
cide (like Caterina in the Clerical Scenes and Bulstrode 
in Middlemarcli), and withholds her hand from her 
drowning husband, one is strongly tempted to give 
the verdict, " Served him right." She, however, feels 
some remorse ; and Daniel Deronda, who becomes her 
confessor, is much too admirable a being to give any 
sanction to this immoral source of consolation. She is 



XIII.] DANIEL DEBONDA 187 

so chai'ming in her way that we feel more interest in 
the criminal than in the confessor. *' I have no sym- 
pathy," she says on one occasion, " with women who 
are always doing right." Perhaps that is the reason 
why we cannot quite bow the knee before Daniel 
Deronda. 

That young gentleman is a model from the first. 
He has a " seraphic face." There is " hardly a delicacy 
of feeling " of which he is not capable — even when he 
is at Eton. Pie is so ethereal a being that we are a 
little shocked when he is mentioned in connection with 
entrees. One can't fancy an angel at a London dinner 
table. That is, indeed, the impression which he makes 
upon his friend. A family is created expressly to pay 
homage to him. They are supposed to have a sense of 
humour to make their worship more impressive ; but 
they certainly keep it in the background when speak- 
ing of him. People, says one of the young ladies, 
must be content to take our brothers for husbands, 
because they can't get Deronda. "No woman ought 
to want to marry him," replies her sister ..." fancy 
finding out that he had a tailor's bill and used boot- 
hooks, like our brother." Angels don't employ tailors. 
They compare him to his face to Buddha, who gave 
himself to a famishing tigress to save her and her cubs 
from starvation. To Gwendolen this peerless person 
naturally becomes an " outer conscience " ; and when he 
exhorts her to use her past sorrow as a preparation for 
life, instead of letting it spoil her life, the words are 
to her "like the touch of a miraculous hand." She 
begins " a new existence," but it seems " inseparable 
from Deronda," and she longs that his presence may 
be permanent. Happily she does not dare to love him. 



188 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

and hopes only to be bound to him by a "spiritual 
tie." That is just as well, because by a fortunate 
accident he has picked a perfect young Jewess out of 
the Thames, into which she had thrown herself, like 
Mary Wollstonecraft. Moreover, by another providen- 
tial accident — Providence interferes rather to excess 
— he has walked into the city and stumbled upon a 
virtuous Jewish pawnbroker ; and at the pawnbroker's 
has met the Jewess's long-lost brother Mordeeai, who 
turns out to be as perfect as Deronda himself. 

It must be admitted that the Jewish circle into 
which Deronda is admitted does not strike one as 
drawn from the life. That is only natural, as Mordeeai 
is the incarnated pursuit of an ideal. Mordeeai is 
devoted to the restoration of the Jewish nationality — 
a scheme which to the vulgar mind seems only one 
degree less chimerical than Zarca's plan for a gypsy 
nationality in Africa. It gives a chance to Deronda, 
however. For a perfect young man in a time of 
" social questions," he has hitherto been rather oddly 
at a loss for an end to which he can devote his powers. 
This is explained by a lengthy dissertation on his 
character. He is too good. " His plenteous flexible 
sympathy had ended by falling into one current with 
that reflective analysis which tends to neutralise sym- 
pathy." He is not vicious, but he "takes even vices 
mildly " ; he is " fervidly democratic " from sympathy 
with the people, and yet " intensely conservative " 
from imagination and affection. He likes to be on the 
losing side in order to have the pleasure of martyrdom ; 
but he is afraid that too much martyrdom will make 
him bitter. The solution comes by the discovery, 
strangely delayed by a combination of circumstances. 



xiik] DANIEL DEROXDA 189 

that he was a genuine Jew by birth. Now he can 
accept Mordecai for his prophet and take " heredity " 
for his guide. " You," he says to that inspired person, 
" have given shape to what, I believe, was an inherited 
yearning — the effect of brooding passionate thoughts 
in many ancestors — thoughts that seem to have been 
intensely present with my grandfather." He has 
always longed for an "ideal task" — some ''captain- 
ship, which should come to him as a duty and not 
be striven for as a personal prize." The " idea that 
I am possessed with," as he afterward explains, is 
" that of restoring a political existence to my people, 
n^aking them a nation again, giving them a national 
centre such as the English, though they too are 
scattered over the face of the globe." It seems from 
her volume of essays {Theophrastus Such) that George 
Eliot considered this to be a reasonable investment 
of human energy. As we cannot all discover that 
we belong to the chosen people, and some of us might, 
even then, doubt the wisdom of the enterprise, one feels 
that Deronda's mode of solving his problem is not 
generally applicable. George Eliot's sympathy for the 
Jews, her aversion to Anti-Semitism, was thoroughly 
generous, and naturally welcomed by its objects. 
But taken as the motive of a hero it strikes one as 
showing a defective sense of humour. " One may 
understand jokes without liking them," says the 
musician Klesmer ; and adds, " I am very sensible 
to wit and humour." There can be no doubt that 
George Eliot was very sensible to those qualities, and 
yet she refuses to perceive that Daniel Deronda is an 
amiable monomaniac and occasionally a very prosy 
moralist. 



190 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

I must repeat that George Eliot was intensely femi- 
nine, tliougli more philosophical than most women. 
She shows it to the best purpose in the subtlety and 
the charm of her portraits of women, unrivalled in some 
ways by any writer of either sex ; and shows it also, 
as I think, in a true perception of the more feminine 
aspects of her male characters. Still, she sometimes 
illustrates the weakness of the feminine view. Daniel 
Deronda is not merely a feminine but, one is inclined 
to say, a schoolgirl's hero. He is so sensitive and 
scrupulously delicate that he will not soil his hands by 
joining in the rough play of ordinary political and 
social reformers. He will not compromise, and yet he 
shares the dislike of his creator for fanatics and the 
devotees of " fads." The monomaniac type is certainly 
disagreeable, though it may be useful. Deronda con- 
trives to avoid its more offensive peculiarities, but at 
the price of devoting himself to an unreal and dreamy 
object. Probably, one fancies, he became disgusted in 
later life by finding that, after Mordecai's death, the 
people with whom he had to work had not the charm 
of that half-inspired visionary. He is, in any case, an 
idealist, who can only be provided with a task by a 
kind of providential interposition. The discovery that 
one can be carrying out one's grandfather's ideas is 
not generally a very powerful source of inspiration. 
" Heredity " represents an important factor in life, but 
can hardly be made into a religion. So far, therefore, 
as Deronda is an sesthetic embodiment of an ethical 
revelation — a judicious hint to a young man in search 
of an ideal — he represents an untenable theory. From 
the point of view of the simple novel reader he fails from 
unreality. George Eliot, in later years, came to know 



XIII.] DANIEL DEB ON DA 191 

several representatives in the younger generation of 
the class to which Deroncla belonged. She speaks, for 
example, with great warmth of Henry Sidgwick. His 
friends, she remarks, by their own account, always 
" expected him to act according to a higher standard " 
than they would attribute to any one else or adopt 
for themselves. She sent Deronda to Cambridge soon 
after she had written this, and took great care to 
give an accurate account of the incidents of Cambridge 
life. I have always fancied — though without any 
evidence — that some touches in Deronda were drawn 
from one of her friends, Edmund Gurney, a man 
of remarkable charm of character, and as good- 
looking as Deronda. In the Cambridge atmosphere of 
Deronda's days there was, I think, a certain element 
of rough common sense which might have knocked 
some of her hero's nonsense out of him. But, in any 
case, one is sensible that George Eliot, if she is think- 
ing of real life at all, has come to see through a 
romantic haze which deprives the portrait of reality. 
The imaginative sense is declining, and the characters 
are becoming emblems or symbols of principle, and 
composed of more moonshine than solid flesh and 
blood. The Gwendolen story taken by itself is a 
masterly piece of social satire ; but in spite of the 
approval of learned Jews, it is imi^ossible to feel any 
enthusiastic regard for Deronda in his surrounding^s. 



CHAPTER XIV 



CONCLUSION 



The Leweses had been in the habit of recruiting their 
health in various country places in the neighbourhood 
of London, as well as in occasional trips to the Con- 
tinent. In 1876 they bought a house at Witley, near 
Godalming, in the charming Surrey country which 
looks up to Hindhead and Blackdown. They were 
neighbours of Tennyson, who saw them occasionally 
both there and in town. An anecdote of a quarrel 
between them is refuted by Tennyson's son. What 
really happened was that, as she was leaving his 
house, Tennyson pressed her hand " kindly and 
sweetly," and said, "I wish you well with your 
molecules ! " She replied as gently, " I get on very 
well with my molecules." Tennyson held that the 
flight of Hetty in Adam Bede and Thackeray's ac- 
count of Colonel Newcome's decline were " the two 
most pathetic things in modern fiction." He greatly 
admired her insight into character, " but did not 
think her so true to nature as Shakespeare and Miss 
Austen." I will not argue upon such dicta, though 
they are interesting in regard to both persons. 
George Eliot was more or less acquainted with other 
eminent writers of her time. The Leweses stayed 
with Mark Pattison at Oxford, and afterwards with 

192 



CHAP. XIV.] CONCLUSION 193 

Jowett, who sent them the proof-sheets of his Plato. 
Dickens was friendly till his death, and she speaks 
with affection of Anthony Trollope, "one of the 
heartiest, most genuine, and moral men we know." 
Their life, however, continued to be secluded, and 
they thought of retiring altogether to Witley. Lewes 
was now working at his last book, the Problems of 
Life and Mind, but his health was beginning to break. 
He was taken ill at the " Priory " towards the end 
of 1878, and died on 28th November. 

George Eliot was prostrated by the blow. The 
first employment to which she could devote herself 
was the arrangement of Lewes's unfinished work. 
She resolved to found a " George Henry Lewes 
studentship," which should enable some young man 
to carry on physiological research. Henry Sidgwick, 
Sir Michael Foster, and others gave her advice, and 
in the course of the year the plan was settled and a 
student elected. Gradually she revived. Her friend, 
Madame Bodichon, describes her in June 1879 as 
" wretchedly thin '" and looking " in her long loose 
black dress like the black shadow of herself." Still, 
she said that " she had so much to do that she must 
keep well " ; the world was so " intensely interesting." 
She had at this time published the last of her books, 
which had already been read and approved by Lewes. 
TJie Impressions of Theojyhrastus Such is a curious per- 
formance which certainly seems to suggest that her 
intellect — though not weakened — had somehow got 
into the least appropriate application of its energies. 
A short essay should above all things be bright and 
clear, and if it touches grave thoughts, touch them with 
a light hand. Nobody can call TheophrastHS Such light 



194 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

in its touch. The mannerism which showed itself 
occasionally in her tirst works, the ironical application 
of scientific analogies to trifling matters, sometimes hits 
the mark, but was always apt to become ponderous, 
if not pedantic. Theophrastus Such seems to be entirely 
composed of such matter, questionable, perhaps, at the 
best, and making the unpleasant impression of all 
laborious attempts at witticism. She had, for example, 
been disgusted, as every real lover of good literature 
must be disgusted, at flippant and irreverent bur- 
lesques. She protests against a practice which she 
calls " debasing the moral currency." '' And yet, it 
seems, parents will put into the hands of their children 
ridiculous parodies (perhaps with more ridiculous 
' illustrations ') of the poems which stirred their own 
tenderness and filial duty, and cause them to make 
their first acquaintance with great men, great works, 
or solemn crises, through the medium of some miscel- 
laneous burlesque which, with its idiotic puns and 
farcical attitudes, will remain among their primary 
associations and reduce them throughout their time 
of studious preparation for life to the moral imbecility 
of an inward giggle at what might have stimulated 
the high emulation which fed the fountains of com- 
passion, trust, and constancy." That may be very 
true, but surely it would be possible to put it a 
little more pointedly. George Eliot in writing these 
essays seems first to have got into the too didactic vein 
to which she was always prone, and then to have put 
her observations into the most tortuous and cumbi'ous 
shape by way of giving them an air of solemnity. 
What, one asks, had become of Mrs. Poyser ? The 
book, however, succeeded well enough to satisfy her ; 



XIV.] CONCLUSION 196 

but I can hardly believe that anybody can now read it 
except from a sense of duty. 

The remainder of George Eliot's life may be told in 
a few words. In 1867 Lewes had been introduced by 
Mr. Herbert Spencer to Mrs. Cross, a lady then living 
at Weybridge with a daughter, ]\liss Elizabeth D. 
Cross, who had just published a volume of poems. 
Miss Cross was invited by Lewes to see George Eliot, 
and a friendship sprang up between the families. In 
1869 the Leweses paid a visit to the Crosses at Wey- 
bridge, and the friendship became intimacy. The 
death of Lewes's son, Thornton, and of a married 
daughter of Mrs. Cross within the next two months, 
strengthened the bond by mutual sympathy. Mr. 
John Walter Cross, son of Mrs. Cross, then a banker 
at New York, was staying at AVeybridge during George 
Eliot's visit, and soon afterwards settled in England in 
his mother's house. He became very intimate with 
the Leweses, and frequently visited them at Witley. 
After Lewes's death he was an able and sympathetic 
adviser. His mother had died a week after Lewes, 
and he was anxious to find relief and occupation in 
some new pursuit. He began to read Dante, and 
George Eliot proposed to help him in his studies. 
From that time they saw each other constantly ; and 
as George Eliot's spirit recovered from the shock, she 
began again to find pleasure in music and in visiting 
the National Gallery. The support of Mr. Cross's 
companionship relieved her sense of desolation, and in 
April 1880 they decided upon marriage. The marriage 
took place on 6th May, and the only possible comment 
is her own statement to Mme. Bodichon. '' Mr. Cross's 
family," she says, " welcome me with the utmost ten- 



196 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

derness. All this is wonderful blessing falling to me 
beyond my share after I had thought that life was 
ended, and that, so to speak, my coffin was ready for 
me in the next room. Deep down below there is a 
river of sadness, but this must always be with those 
who have lived long — and I am able to enjoy my 
newly reopened life. I shall be a better, more loving 
creature than I could have been in solitude. To be 
constantly, lovingly grateful for the gift of a perfect 
love is the best illumination of one's mind to all the 
possible good there may be in store for man on this 
troublous little planet." 

The Crosses made a tour after their marriage, stay- 
ing some time at Venice, and returning to Witley by 
the end of July. Her health seemed at first to have 
greatly improved, and she was able to take walks and 
to see sights during the journey. After returning to 
England, she had a serious attack in September, fol- 
lowed by a partial recovery. On 4th December the 
Crosses moved into a new house which they had taken 
at 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. A fortnight later a slight 
chill brought on a fresh attack. Her previous illness 
had weakened her power of rallying, and she died on 
22nd December 1880. 

George Eliot's main personal characteristics should 
be sufficiently indicated by what I have already said. 
A few remarks, howevei', may help to complete the 
picture. Among her active employments she found 
time to lead the life of an industrious student. Though 
frequently interrupted by ill-health, she was capable 
of sustained and severe attention to difficult subjects. 
The list of her accomplishments acquired at different 
periods is a long one. She had a thorough knowledge 



XIV.] CONCLUSION 197 

of French, German, Italian, and Spanish, and could 
talk in each language correctly, though " with diffi- 
culty." She could read the classical languages with 
pleasure ; and kept up her familiarity with the great 
masterpieces of all periods by frequent re-reading. 
She was fond of reading aloud, especially Milton and 
the Bible ; and a fine voice, perfectly under command, 
gave peculiar power to her rendering of solemn and 
majestic passages. Hebrew was a favourite study; 
and though she read little of the lighter literature of the 
day, she had a very retentive memory of the novels — 
George Sand's, for example — which she had read in 
her youth. She read a good many historical works, 
and, as we have seen, could get up minute antiquarian 
details with unflagging industry. Besides her main 
studies, she had dipped into scientific writings, had 
at one time taken to geometry, and thought that she 
had some aptitude for mathematics. Her interest in 
the philosophical speculations of the time we have 
sufficiently indicated. Her powers of assimilating 
knowledge were, in fact, extraordinary, and it may 
safely be said that no novelist of mark ever possessed 
a wider intellectual culture. With all her knowledge, 
she attended to the ordinary feminine duties. She 
was proud of her good housekeeping, and her early 
training and love of order had given her a thorough 
knowledge of how such matters should be done. She 
sympathised, of course, with projects for reforming 
female education, and was one of the first subscribers 
to Girton College. She had, however, a characteristic 
misgiving lest a university system might weaken the 
bonds of family life. The feminine qualities are as 
characteristic of the student as of the writer. She 



198 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

read reverently, with a desire to appreciate and 
admire. The critical, or rather scoffing attitude of 
mind, was intensely antipathetic to her. She seems 
to have loved especially the gentler and more serious 
observers of life, such as Goldsmith and Cowper and 
Miss Austen, and venerated such great men as Dante 
and Milton (" her demi-god," as she calls him), whose 
austerity breathes a lofty moral sentiment. She rarely 
expresses her antipathies ; but one instance is char- 
acteristic. Of Byron she speaks with disgust, as 'the 
"most vulgar-minded genius that ever produced a 
great effect in literature." The author of Don Juan 
could not well be congenial to the creator of Fedalma. 
Women, it is said, are wanting in humour; and per- 
haps for the obvious reason that the humorist is apt 
to find that the easiest roads of making a point lie 
through profanity or indecency. George Eliot's sense 
of humour was undeniably keen, but she will not give 
play to it when it takes the offensive. That need not 
be regretted. It is a less satisfactory result when her 
desire to sympathise with all high impulses leads her 
in her later stories to shut her eyes to the comic side, 
which forces itself upon the less restrained humorists, 
and to present us with model characters verging too 
decidedly upon priggishness. A touch of pedagogic 
severity saddens her view of the frivolous world. Her 
profound conviction of the mischief done by stupidity, 
of the clogging and degrading effect of the general 
atmosphere of commonplace upon aspiring souls, 
diminishes her appreciation of fools, and Theophrastvs 
Such suggests even a tinge of sourness. George Eliot, 
we are told, took little interest in contemporary politics. 
During the war of 1870 she reminds a friend of the 



XIV.] CONCLUSION 199 

famous anecdote of Goethe's indifference to the Revo- 
lution of 1830 as compared with the controversies of 
Cuvier and Saint-Hilaire. She says that it is impossible 
to "doff aside" the French and German war after that 
fashion. In general, however, she seems to have 
accepted Goethe's attitude, and to have been more 
interested in the advances of scientific thought than 
in the reforming energies of Gladstone's first govern- 
ment. She thought that political matters in England 
were managed by " amateurs," that their quarrels 
involved a growing quantity of personal abuse and im- 
putation of unworthy motive. That is a natural impres- 
sion of the philosophical looker-on ; and I need not ask 
whether active politicians are justified in meeting it 
with simple contempt. Her sympathy with the posi- 
tivists predisposed her, moreover, to think more of 
the slow operation of changed ideals than of particular 
political changes. Her interest in positivism was 
always strong. She was on terms of intimate friend- 
ship with Dr. Congreve, Mr. Frederic Harrison, and 
Professor Beesly, and subscribed to the funds of the 
central body. She did not, indeed, accept positivist 
doctrines unreservedl}^, and had by her side a keen 
critic in George Lewes, who had followed Comte's 
early teaching, but repudiated the theories of social 
reconstruction propounded in the later Politique Posi- 
tive. Both, it appears, regarded it as " a Utopia, pre- 
senting hypotheses rather than doctrines," and she 
could sympathise with Comte as " an individual " 
trying " to anticipate the work of future generations." 
The special point of sympathy was, of course, the 
aspect with M^hich the Comtists regarded the old 
creeds as stages in the continuous evolution of 



200 GEOROE ELIOT [chap. 

humanity. In that respect, too, George Eliot was 
eminently feminine. She had the strong religious 
instinct common to so many noble women in whose 
sympathy masculine reformers have foimd comfort 
amidst the harsh controversies and struggles of active 
work. The history of her books is on one side a 
history of the consequent development of her mind. 
Her intellectual expansion led her to accept the teach- 
ing of the men who represented for her the most 
advanced thought of the time. But the aggressive- 
ness which it generated for a time was a transitory 
frame of mind. The first series of novels represents 
the fond dwelling upon all the loftier impulses which 
had uttered themselves in stammering and imperfect 
dialects prescribed by dogmas no longer tenable; 
while the later correspond to a longing to find an 
utterance reconcilable with full acceptance of scientific 
truth.'^ Daniel Deronda, one fancies, would have em- 
bodied her sentiments more completely if, instead of 
devoting himself to the Jews, he had become a leading 
prophet in the church of humanity. That, no doubt, 
would have brought him into too close a contact with 
notorious facts. 

I have said that George Eliot's peculiar place among 
the novelists of the time was in some sense determined 
by the philosophical tendencies which were shared by 
none of her contemporaries. I do not mean to imply 
that it was her proper function to propagate any 
■philosophical doctrine, and have tried to point out 
the defects due to her inclinations in that direction. 
Novels should, I take it, be transfigured experience ; 
they should be based upon the direct obsei'vation and 
the genuine emotions which it has inspired : when 



XIV.] CONCLUSION 201 

they are deliberately intended to be a symbolism of 
any general formula, they become unreal as representa- 
tive of fact, and unsatisfactory as philosophical ex- 
position. George Eliot's early success and the faults 
of her later work illustrate, I have said, the right and 
wrong methods. But, in conclusion, I may try to 
indicate what seems to me to be the quality which, in 
spite of inevitable shortcomings in undertaking the im- 
possible, gives the permanent interest of her works. 
That, I think, appears most simply by regarding them 
as implicit autobiography. George Eliot gives a direct 
picture of the England of her early days, and, less 
directly, a picture of its later developments. Her 
picture of the old country life owes its charm to the 
personal memories, and may possibly have a little 
personal colouring. If a novelist could be thoroughly 
"realistic," and give the truth, the whole truth, and 
nothing but the truth, there would no doubt be a good 
deal to add to the descriptions of the life at Shepperton 
and Dorlcote JNIill. But then, I do not believe that 
any human intellect can give the whole truth about 
anything. What can be given truly is the impression 
made npon the mind of the observer; and when the 
observer has a mind of such reflective power, so much 
insight, and such tenderness and sensibility as George 
Eliot's, its impressions will correspond to realities, and 
reveal most interesting though not all-comprehensive 
truths. The combination of an exquisitely sympathetic 
and loving nature with a large and tolerant intellect is 
manifest throughout. George Eliot could see the 
absurdities, and even the brutalities, of her neighbours 
plainly, but understood them well enough to make 
them intelligible, not mere absurdities to be caricatured; 



202 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

she saw the charming aspects of the old order with 
equal clearness, but has no illusions which would 
convert the country into a pretty Arcadia; and 
her sympathy with sorrow and unsatisfied longings 
is too deep and reflective to allow her to stray into 
mere sentimentalism. Her pathos is powerful because 
it is always under command. The more superficial 
writer treats an era of misery as implying a grievance 
which can be summarily removed, or finds in it an 
opportunity of exhibiting his own sensibility. Her 
feeling is too deep and her perception of the com- 
plexity of its causes too thorough to admit of such 
treatment. We see the tender woman who has gone 
through much experience, always devotedly attached 
by the strongest ties of affection ; but always reflecting, 
shrinking from excesses of passion or of scoffing, and 
trying to see men and life as parts of a wider order. 

The same personal element appears in her later 
work in spite of the defects which I take to be un- 
deniable. George Eliot, as we have seen, looked on 
the world with a certain aloofness. She read little of 
the ephemeral literature of the day, and apparently 
thought very ill of what she did read. She looked at 
the political warfare from a distance, and did not go 
into the society deeply interested in such matters. The 
" Priory " was frequented by a circle whose talk was of 
philosophy and scientific discoveries, and which Avas 
more interested in theories than in the gossip of the 
day. She had not therefore the experience which could 
enable her to describe contemporary life, with its 
social and political ambitions and the rough struggle 
for existence in which practical lawyers and men of 
business are mainly occupied. She thinks of the 



XIV.] CONCLUSION 203 

world chiefly as the surrounding element of sordid 
aims into which her idealists are to go forth with such 
hope as may be of leavening the mass. She could not, 
therefore, draw lifelike portraits of such characters 
as were the staple of the ordinary novelist. The 
questions, however, in which she was profoundly in- 
terested were undeniably of the highest importance. 
( The period of her writings was one in which, as we 
can now see more clearly than at the time, very 
significant changes were taking place in English 
thought and life. Controversies on " evolutionism" and 
socialism and democracy were showing the set of the 
current. George Eliot's heroes and heroines are all 
more or less troubled by the results, whether they live 
ostensibly in England or in distant countries and 
centuries. I need say nothing more of her special 
view of the questions at issue. But incidentally, as 
one may say, she came, in treating of her favourite 
theme — the idealist in search of a vocation — to exhibit 
her own characteristics. The long gallery of heroines, 
from Milly Barton to Gwendolen Harleth, have 
various tasks set to them, in which we may be 
more or less interested. But the women themselves, 
whatever their outward circumstances, have an inter- 
est unsurpassed by any other writer. They have, of 
course, a certain family likeness ; and if Maggie is 
most like her creator, the others show an affinity to 
some of her characteristics. George Eliot is reported 
to have said that the character which she found most 
difficult to support was that of Rosamond Vincy, the 
young woman who paralyses Lydgate. One can under- 
stand the statement, for it is Rosamond's function to do 
exactly what is most antipathetic to her biographer. 



204 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. 

She is tlie embodied contradictory of her creator's 
morality. Yet she, too, is a vigorous portrait, and the 
whole series may be given triumphantly as a proof of 
what is called "knowledge of the human heart." I 
dislike the phrase, because it seems to imply that 
an abstract science with that subject-matter is in 
existence — which I should certainly deny. But if it 
only means that George Eliot could — without any 
formula — sympathise with a singularly wide range 
of motive and feeling, and especially with noble and 
tender natures, and represent the concrete embodiment 
with extraordinary power, then 1 can fully subscribe 
to the opinion. I think, as I have said, that one is 
always conscious that her women are drawn from the 
inside, and that her most successful men are sub- 
stantially women in disguise. But the two sexes have 
a good deal in common ; and in the setting forth some 
of the moral and intellectual processes which we can 
all understand, George Eliot shows unsurpassable skill. 
Here and there, no doubt, there is too much explicit 
" psychological analysis," and a rather ponderous 
enumeration of obvious aphorisms in the pomp of 
scientific analogy. But she is singularly powerful in 
describing the conflicts of emotions ; the ingenious 
modes of self-deception in which most of us acquire 
considerable skill ; the uncomfortable results of keeping 
a conscience till we have learnt to come to an under- 
standing with it ; the grotesque mixture of motives 
which results when we have reached a modus vivencU; 
the downright hypocrisy of the lower nature, or the 
comparatively pardonable and even commendable state 
of mind of the person who has a thoroughly consistent 
code of action, though he unconsciously interprets its 



XIV.] CONCLUSION 205 

laws in a non-natural sense to suit his convenience. 
G-eorge Eliot's power of watching and describing the 
various manoeuvres by which people keep their self- 
respect and satisfy their feelings shows her logical 
subtlety, which appears again in her quaint description 
of the odd processes which take the place of reasoning 
in the uneducated intelligence. 

George Eliot believed that a work of art not only 
may, but must, exercise also an ethical influence. I 
will not inquire how much influence is actually 
exerted by novels upon the morality of their readers ; 
but so far as any influence is exerted, it is due, I think, 
in the last resort to the personality of the novelist. 
That is to say, that from reading George Eliot's novels 
we are influenced in the same way as by an intimacy 
with George Eliot herself. Undoubtedly, in effect, 
that might vary indefinitely according to the preju- 
dices and character of the other party. But, in any 
ease, we feel that the writer with whom we have been 
in contact possessed a singularly wide and reflective 
intellect, a union of keen sensibility with a thoroughly 
tolerant spirit, a desire to appreciate all the good 
hidden under the commonplace and narrow, a lively 
sympathy with all the nobler aspirations; a vivid 
insight into the perplexities and delusions which beset 
even the strongest minds, brilliant powers of wit, at 
once playful and pungent, and, if we must add, a rather 
melancholy view of life in general, a melanchol}^ 
which is not nursed for purposes of display, but forced 
upon a fine understanding by the view of a state of 
things which, we must admit, does not altogether lend 
itself to a cheerful optimism. I have endeavoured to 
point out what limitations must be adopted by an 



206 GEORGE ELIOT [chap. xiv. 

honest critic. George Eliot's works, as I have read, 
have not, at the present clay, quite so high a position 
as was assigned to them by contemporary enthusiasm. 
That is a common phenomenon enough ; and, in her 
case, I take it to be due chiefly to the partial mis- 
direction of her powers in the later period. But when I 
compare her work with that of other novelists, I cannot 
doubt that she had powers of mind and a richness of 
emotional nature rarely equalled, or that her writings — 
whatever their shortcomings — will have a correspond- 
ing value in the estimation of thoughtful readers. 



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